Monday, September 17, 2012

1209.3015 (Dan Hooper et al.)

Stringent and Robust Constraints on the Dark Matter Annihilation Cross Section From the Region of the Galactic Center    [PDF]

Dan Hooper, Chris Kelso, Farinaldo S. Queiroz
For any realistic halo profile, the Galactic Center is predicted to be the brightest source of gamma-rays from dark matter annihilations. Due in large part to uncertainties associated with the dark matter distribution and astrophysical backgrounds, however, the most commonly applied constraints on the dark matter annihilation cross section have been derived from other regions, such as dwarf spheroidal galaxies. In this article, we study Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope data from the direction of the inner Galaxy and derive robust yet stringent upper limits on the dark matter's annihilation cross section. Even for the very conservative case of a dark matter distribution with a significant (~kpc) constant-density core, normalized to the minimum density needed to accommodate rotation curve and microlensing measurements, we find that the Galactic Center constraint is approximately as stringent as those derived from dwarf galaxies (which were derived under the assumption of an NFW distribution). For NFW or Einasto profiles (again, normalized to the minimum allowed density), the Galactic Center constraints are significantly stronger. For example, for a dark matter particle with an annihilation cross section of sigma v=3 x 10^-26 cm^3/s to b-bar and distributed according to an Einasto profile, we robustly rule out dark matter particles with a mass of less than 285 GeV.
View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1209.3015

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