The characterization of the gamma-ray signal from the central Milky Way: A case for annihilating dark matter

By T. Daylan, Douglas P. Finkbeiner, D. Hooper, T. Linden, S. Portillo, Nicholas L. Rodd, T. Slatyer. 2014

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Abstract Past studies have identified a spatially extended excess of ∼1–3 GeV gamma rays from the region surrounding the Galactic Center, consistent with the emission expected from annihilating dark matter. We revisit and scrutinize this signal with the intention of further constraining its characteristics and origin. By applying cuts to the Fermi event parameter CTBCORE, we suppress the tails of the point spread function and generate high resolution gamma-ray maps, enabling us to more easily separate the various gamma-ray components. Within these maps, we find the GeV excess to be robust and highly statistically significant, with a spectrum, angular distribution, and overall normalization that is in good agreement with that predicted by simple annihilating dark matter models. For example, the signal is very well fit by a 36–51 GeV dark matter particle annihilating to b b with an annihilation cross section of σ v = ( 1 − 3 ) × 1 0 − 26 cm 3 / s (normalized to a local dark matter density of 0.4 GeV / cm 3 ). Furthermore, we confirm that the angular distribution of the excess is approximately spherically symmetric and centered around the dynamical center of the Milky Way (within ∼ 0.0 5 ∘ of Sgr A ∗ ), showing no sign of elongation along the Galactic Plane. The signal is observed to extend to at least ≃ 1 0 ∘ from the Galactic Center, which together with its other morphological traits disfavors the possibility that this emission originates from previously known or modeled pulsar populations.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8531403243be0c2cf3b13c97d375b248ef1ac0ab

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Citations in the corpus

DWARF GALAXY ANNIHILATION AND DECAY EMISSION PROFILES FOR DARK MATTER EXPERIMENTS (2014, background): “…PA 15213; mgwalker@andrew.cmu.edu pecially interesting in the context of recent claims of a Galactic center gamma-ray excess and associated dark matter interpretation (e.g. Hooper & Goodenough 2011; Boyarsky et al. 2011; Abazajian & Kaplinghat 2012, 2013; Abazajian et al. 2014; Daylan et al. 2014).”
WIMP dark matter candidates and searches—current status and future prospects (2017, background): “s, as discussed in [301]. Initially, ts to the excess favored DM annihilating to bband ˝+˝ with m ˜ ˇ40GeV and m ˜ ˇ10GeV, respectively. The annihilation cross section was reported as 2 3 10 26cm3=s [270] for bb and 7 9 10 27cm3=s for ˝+˝ [265] { 25 { (a) X s v \ = 2.2 ´ 10 - 26 cm 3 s hh W+Wtt b Z”
An Introduction to Particle Dark Matter (2019, background): “Such excess was also subsequently reported independently and with a variety of different assumptions for the background in References [36–38].”
The Fermi Galactic Center GeV Excess and Implications for Dark Matter (2017, background): “There are claims of both spherical (e.g., Calore et al. 2015; Daylan et al. 2016) and bi-lobed (e.g., Yang & Aharonian 2016; Macias et al. 2016) morphology of the excess.”
Dark nuclei. I. Cosmology and indirect detection (2014, methodology): “Higgs will be to a pair of b-quarks. To t the spectrum, we employ the prompt gamma ray spectrum from b-quarks obtained in Ref. [92].7 We calculate the J-factor for the best-t NFW [94] prole of Ref. [81] with 6It should be noted that plausible interpretations based on SM physics have also been sugges”