CONSTRAINTS ON THE GALACTIC HALO DARK MATTER FROM FERMI-LAT DIFFUSE MEASUREMENTS

By M. Ackermann, M. Ajello, W. Atwood, L. Baldini, G. Barbiellini, D. Bastieri, K. Bechtol, R. Bellazzini, R. Blandford, E. Bloom and 131 more. 2012

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We have performed an analysis of the diffuse gamma-ray emission with the Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) in the Milky Way halo region, searching for a signal from dark matter annihilation or decay. In the absence of a robust dark matter signal, constraints are presented. We consider both gamma rays produced directly in the dark matter annihilation/decay and produced by inverse Compton scattering of the e+/e− produced in the annihilation/decay. Conservative limits are derived requiring that the dark matter signal does not exceed the observed diffuse gamma-ray emission. A second set of more stringent limits is derived based on modeling the foreground astrophysical diffuse emission using the GALPROP code. Uncertainties in the height of the diffusive cosmic-ray halo, the distribution of the cosmic-ray sources in the Galaxy, the index of the injection cosmic-ray electron spectrum, and the column density of the interstellar gas are taken into account using a profile likelihood formalism, while the parameters governing the cosmic-ray propagation have been derived from fits to local cosmic-ray data. The resulting limits impact the range of particle masses over which dark matter thermal production in the early universe is possible, and challenge the interpretation of the PAMELA/Fermi-LAT cosmic ray anomalies as the annihilation of dark matter.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/374e2b1440b2cd12c4b855638f861c3ceed9bb93

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Citations in the corpus

Fermi Large Area Telescope Fourth Source Catalog (2019, methodology): “More information about the LAT is provided in Atwood et al. (2009), and the in-flight calibration of the LAT is described in Abdo et al. (2009d) and Ackermann et al. (2012a, 2012c).”
Constraining light dark matter with diffuse X-ray and gamma-ray observations (2013, methodology): “The lifetime of Weak-scale DM is constrained from observations with the Fermi Large Area Telescope (Fermi LAT) to τ & 1026 sec [28–32], many orders of magnitude larger than the age of the Universe.”
Astrophysical models for the origin of the positron (2011, background): “more stringent limits have been derived from gamma rays, starting from the exploratory studies [42, 43] to the more recent ones in [44, 45], which add to stringent bounds following from cosmic microwave background data (for a recent study see [46]), antiprotons [47], or radio data [48, 49].”