Constraints on cosmological dark matter annihilation from the Fermi-LAT isotropic diffuse gamma-ray measurement

By T. F. C. A. A. Abdo, M. Ackermann, M. Ajello, L. Baldini, J. Ballet, G. Barbiellini, D. Bastieri, K. Bechtol, R. Bellazzini, B. Berenji and 139 more. 2010

206 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The first published Fermi large area telescope (Fermi-LAT) measurement of the isotropic diffuse gamma-ray emission is in good agreement with a single power law, and is not showing any signature of a dominant contribution from dark matter sources in the energy range from 20 to 100 GeV. We use the absolute size and spectral shape of this measured flux to derive cross section limits on three types of generic dark matter candidates: annihilating into quarks, charged leptons and monochromatic photons. Predicted gamma-ray fluxes from annihilating dark matter are strongly affected by the underlying distribution of dark matter, and by using different available results of matter structure formation we assess these uncertainties. We also quantify how the dark matter constraints depend on the assumed conventional backgrounds and on the Universe's transparency to high-energy gamma-rays. In reasonable background and dark matter structure scenarios (but not in all scenarios we consider) it is possible to exclude models proposed to explain the excess of electrons and positrons measured by the Fermi-LAT and PAMELA experiments. Derived limits also start to probe cross sections expected from thermally produced relics (e.g. in minimal supersymmetry models) annihilating predominantly into quarks. For the monochromatic gamma-ray signature, the current measurement constrains only dark matter scenarios with very strong signals.

Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cabe71ceeec24817912b082e5917d348e549cfe5

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Citations in the corpus

• Dark matter and fundamental physics with the Cherenkov Telescope Array (2012, background): “3 in [129] shows that the gamma-ray spectrum of DM annihilation could reach the measured gamma-ray background spectrum and therefore deliver a significant fraction of the measured flux.”
• SEARCH FOR DARK MATTER SATELLITES USING FERMI-LAT (2012, unknown): “However, since Sourcelike fits each energy bin indepen dently, we expected to find source candidates that were excluded from the 1FGL, either because they had non-power-Iaw spectra or they had hard spectra with too few photons to pass the 1FGL spectral analysis.”
• THE ORIGIN OF THE EXTRAGALACTIC GAMMA-RAY BACKGROUND AND IMPLICATIONS FOR DARK MATTER ANNIHILATION (2015, methodology): “Blazars, which constitute the largest population detected by the LAT, were found to contribute ∼20–30% of the unresolved EGB (Abdo et al. 2010c; Singal et al. 2012; Harding & Abazajian 2012; Di Mauro et al. 2014), and a larger fraction in some models (Stecker & Venters 2011).”
• Light scalar WIMP through the Higgs portal and CoGeNT (2010, methodology): “This is again based on FermiLAT data, released in [29], which constrains candidates above 10 GeV (see also [30]).”