The Fermi Galactic Center GeV Excess and Implications for Dark Matter

By The Fermi-LAT Collaboration. 2017

335 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The region around the Galactic center (GC) is now well established to be brighter at energies of a few GeV than expected from conventional models of diffuse gamma-ray emission and catalogs of known gamma-ray sources. We study the GeV excess using 6.5 years of data from the Fermi Large Area Telescope. We characterize the uncertainty of the GC excess spectrum and morphology due to uncertainties in cosmic-ray source distributions and propagation, uncertainties in the distribution of interstellar gas in the Milky Way, and uncertainties due to a potential contribution from the Fermi bubbles. We also evaluate uncertainties in the excess properties due to resolved point sources of gamma rays. The Galactic center is of particular interest as it would be expected to have the brightest signal from annihilation of weakly interacting massive dark matter particles. However, control regions along the Galactic plane, where a dark-matter signal is not expected, show excesses of similar amplitude relative to the local background. Based on the magnitude of the systematic uncertainties, we conservatively report upper limits for the annihilation cross section as function of particle mass and annihilation channel.

Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cfc71c91885369f46c785772bbcec7152bdb394d

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In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

1. Matthew R. Buckley
2. A. Peter
3. E. M. Sessolo
4. L. Roszkowski
5. S. Trojanowski

Citations in the corpus

• WIMP dark matter candidates and searches—current status and future prospects (2017, background): “On the other hand, recent Fermi-LAT analysis of the GCE [296] confirmed the existence of the excess and studied in detail its morphology.”
• Gravitational probes of dark matter physics (2017, background): “ction methods. 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”