4.6 Article

Consequences of a dark disk for the Fermi and PAMELA signals in theories with a Sommerfeld enhancement

Journal

Publisher

IOP PUBLISHING LTD
DOI: 10.1088/1475-7516/2010/09/010

Keywords

dark matter theory; cosmic ray experiments

Funding

  1. DOE [DE-FG02-06ER41417]
  2. Mark Leslie Graduate Assistantship

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Much attention has been given to dark matter explanations of the PAMELA positron fraction and Fermi electronic excesses. For those theories with a TeV-scale WIMP annihilating through a light force-carrier, the associated Sommerfeld enhancement provides a natural explanation of the large boost factor needed to explain the signals, and the light force-carrier naturally gives rise to hard cosmic ray spectra without excess pi(0)-gamma rays or anti-protons. The Sommerfeld enhancement of the annihilation rate, which at low relative velocities v(rel) scales as 1/v(rel), relies on the comparatively low velocity dispersion of the dark matter particles in the smooth halo. Dark matter substructures in which the velocity dispersion is smaller than in the smooth halo have even larger annihilation rates. N-body simulations containing only dark matter predict the existence of such structures, for example subhalos and caustics, and the effects of these substructures on dark matter indirect detection signals have been studied extensively. The addition of baryons into cosmological simulations of disk-dominated galaxies gives rise to an additional substructure component, a dark disk. The disk has a lower velocity dispersion than the spherical halo component by a factor similar to 6, so the contributions to dark matter signals from the disk can be more significant in Sommerfeld models than for WIMPs without such low-velocity ehancements. We consider the consequences of a dark disk on the observed signals of e(+)e(-), p (p) over bar and gamma-rays as measured by Fermi and PAMELA in models where the WIMP annihilations are into a light boson. We find that both the PAMELA and Fermi results are easily accomodated by scenarios in which a disk signal is included with the standard spherical halo signal. If contributions from the dark disk are important, limits from extrapolations to the center of the galaxy contain significant uncertainties beyond those from the spherical halo profile alone.

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