The positron excess as a smoking gun for dynamical dark matter?
- Department of Physics, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721 USA and Department of Physics, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742 (United States)
- Department of Physics, University of Hawaii, Honolulu, HI 96822 (United States)
- Department of Physics, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, K1S 5B6 (Canada)
One of the most puzzling aspects of recent data from the AMS-02 experiment is an apparent rise in the cosmic-ray positron fraction as a function of energy. This feature is observed out to energies of approximately 350 GeV. One explanation of these results interprets the extra positrons as arising from the decays of dark-matter particles. This in turn typically requires that such particles have rather heavy TeV-scale masses and not undergo simple two-body decays to leptons. In this talk, by contrast, we show that Dynamical Dark Matter (DDM) can not only match existing AMS-02 data on the positron excess, but also accomplish this feat with significantly lighter dark-matter constituents undergoing simple two-body decays to leptons. We also demonstrate that the Dynamical Dark Matter framework makes a fairly robust prediction that the positron fraction should level off and then remain roughly constant out to approximately 1 TeV, without experiencing any sharp downturns. Thus, if we interpret the positron excess in terms of decaying dark matter, the existence of a plateau in the positron fraction at energies less than 1 TeV may be taken as a “smoking gun” of Dynamical Dark Matter.
- OSTI ID:
- 22306116
- Journal Information:
- AIP Conference Proceedings, Vol. 1604, Issue 1; Conference: PPC 2013: 7. international conference on interconnections between particle physics and cosmology, Lead-Deadwood, SD (United States), 24 Jun - 6 Jul 2013; Other Information: (c) 2014 AIP Publishing LLC; Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 0094-243X
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
Similar Records
Fermi/LAT observations of dwarf galaxies highly constrain a dark matter interpretation of excess positrons seen in AMS-02, HEAT, and PAMELA
Interpretation of AMS-02 results: correlations among dark matter signals