Search

The high positron production rate required to explain the flux of 511 keV gamma rays from the Galactic center has inspired many models in which dark matter creates positrons. These models include the annihilation of light dark matter and the scattering of dark matter with excited states (exciting dark matter). We show that existing cosmic microwave background data robustly constrain such models when the annihilation or scattering cross section is not velocity suppressed depending on the model of the Galactic dark matter halo. Upcoming data from the Planck mission can exclude the fiducial Via Lactea II halo model, which also provides a good fit to the 511 keV morphology. We additionally find combined constraints on exciting dark matter scattering and annihilation, and update constraints on the lifetimes of dark matter excited states. Finally, we apply constraints to models of dark matter decay in which produced positrons fall into the Galactic center and produce the 511 keV signal on their annihilation, demonstrating that most of the parameter space of interest is ruled out. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We explore dark matter mechanisms that can simultaneously explain the galactic 511 keV gamma rays observed by INTEGRAL/SPI, the DAMA/LIBRA annual modulation, and the excess of low-recoil dark matter candidates observed by CoGeNT. It requires three nearly degenerate states of dark matter in the 4-7 GeV mass range, with splittings, respectively, of order MeV and a few keV. The top two states have the small mass gap and transitions between them, either exothermic or endothermic, and can account for direct detections. Decays from one of the top states to the ground state produce low-energy positrons in the Galaxy whose associated 511 keV gamma rays are seen by INTEGRAL. This decay can happen spontaneously, if the excited state is metastable (longer lived than the age of the Universe), or it can be triggered by inelastic scattering of the metastable states into the shorter-lived ones. We focus on a simple model where the dark matter is a triplet of an SU(2) hidden sector gauge symmetry, broken at the scale of a few GeV, giving masses of order ≲ 1 GeV to the dark gauge bosons, which mix kinetically with the standard model hypercharge. The purely decaying scenario can give the observed angular dependence of the 511 keV signal with no positron diffusion, while the inelastic scattering mechanism requires transport of the positrons over distances ∼1 kpc before annihilating. We note that an x-ray line of several keV in energy, due to single-photon decays involving the top dark matter states, could provide an additional component to the diffuse x-ray background. The model is testable by proposed low-energy fixed-target experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]