Constraints on dark matter annihilation in clusters of galaxies with the Fermi large area telescope

By M. Ackermann, M. Ajello, A. Allafort, L. Baldini, J. Ballet, G. Barbiellini, D. Bastieri, K. Bechtol, R. Bellazzini, R. Blandford and 131 more. Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, 2010

194 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Nearby clusters and groups of galaxies are potentially bright sources of high-energy gamma-ray emission resulting from the pair-annihilation of dark matter particles. However, no significant gamma-ray emission has been detected so far from clusters in the first 11 months of observations with the Fermi Large Area Telescope. We interpret this non-detection in terms of constraints on dark matter particle properties. In particular for leptonic annihilation final states and particle masses greater than ∼ 200 GeV, gamma-ray emission from inverse Compton scattering of CMB photons is expected to dominate the dark matter annihilation signal from clusters, and our gamma-ray limits exclude large regions of the parameter space that would give a good fit to the recent anomalous Pamela and Fermi-LAT electron-positron measurements. We also present constraints on the annihilation of more standard dark matter candidates, such as the lightest neutralino of supersymmetric models. The constraints are particularly strong when including the fact that clusters are known to contain substructure at least on galaxy scales, increasing the expected gamma-ray flux by a factor of ∼ 5 over a smooth-halo assumption. We also explore the effect of uncertainties in cluster dark matter density profiles, finding a systematic uncertainty in the constraints of roughly a factor of two, but similar overall conclusions. In this work, we focus on deriving limits on dark matter models; a more general consideration of the Fermi-LAT data on clusters and clusters as gamma-ray sources is forthcoming.

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Citations in the corpus

Galactic Searches for Dark Matter (2012, methodology): “However, no gamma-ray emission has been conclusively associated with clusters in the Fermi-LAT one year data, assuming that they are point sources (Ackermann et al., 2010).”
Optimized dark matter searches in deep observations of Segue 1 with MAGIC (2013, background): “So far, gamma-ray observations of galaxy clusters Virgo, Coma, Perseus and Fornax have not returned any positive signal of dark matter emission [130, 131].”
Cosmological Parameters from Observations of Galaxy Clusters (2011, methodology): “While these strong shocks are expected to be efficient particle accelerators, recent observations place tight limits on the volume-averaged pressure contributions from relativistic particles (Ackermann et al. 2010).”
SEARCH FOR COSMIC-RAY-INDUCED GAMMA-RAY EMISSION IN GALAXY CLUSTERS (2013, methodology): “The flux limits we derive substantially improve over previous limits (Ackermann et al. 2010b) due to the increase in data volume and improved modeling of the γray sky as well as improved instrument understanding reflected by the use of reprocessed LAT data with onorbit calibrations.”
Gravitational probes of dark matter physics (2017, background): “Indirect detection searches for dark matter annihilation or decay in the Universe today can improve signal over background by targeting high-density regions — be it the Galactic Center [441, 442, 443, 444, 445, 446, 447, 448, 449, 450, 451, 452, 453, 454, 455, 456], satellite galaxies [457, 458, 459”
PROBING THE PULSAR ORIGIN OF THE ANOMALOUS POSITRON FRACTION WITH AMS-02 AND ATMOSPHERIC CHERENKOV TELESCOPES (2013, methodology): “…compare our results with the projected limits from five years and ten years of Fermi-LAT data, we take the limits from one year of data obtained by Ackermann et al. (2010b) and calculate a best fit power law to the 95% upper limits of ∆ < 0.30 (E / 1 TeV)1.39 and then reduce the limits by the…”
Dark matter and fundamental physics with the Cherenkov Telescope Array (2012, background): “argest gravitationally bound objects and the most recent structures to form [92]. They are complex objects, relevant for both cosmological and astrophysical studies, and for what concerns DM searches [25, 29, 30, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100]. DM, in fact, is supposed to be the dominant component”