4.6 Article

Constraints on dark matter annihilation in clusters of galaxies with the Fermi large area telescope

Journal

Publisher

IOP PUBLISHING LTD
DOI: 10.1088/1475-7516/2010/05/025

Keywords

gamma ray experiments; galaxy clusters; supersymmetry and cosmology; dark energy theory

Funding

  1. National Aeronautics and Space Administration
  2. Department of Energy in the United States
  3. Commissariat a l'Energie Atomique
  4. Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique / Institut National de Physique Nucleaire et de Physique des Particules in France
  5. Agenzia Spaziale Italiana and the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare in Italy
  6. Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT)
  7. High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK)
  8. Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) in Japan
  9. K. A. Wallenberg Foundation
  10. Swedish Research Council
  11. Swedish National Space Board in Sweden
  12. Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica in Italy
  13. Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales in France
  14. Direct For Mathematical & Physical Scien [0757911] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
  15. Direct For Mathematical & Physical Scien
  16. Division Of Physics [GRANTS:13765131] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
  17. Division Of Physics [0757911] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
  18. ICREA Funding Source: Custom

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Nearby clusters and groups of galaxies are potentially bright sources of highenergy gamma-ray emission resulting from the pair-annihilation of dark matter particles. However, no significant gamma-ray emission has been detected so far from clusters in the first 11 months of observations with the Fermi Large Area Telescope. We interpret this non-detection in terms of constraints on dark matter particle properties. In particular for leptonic annihilation final states and particle masses greater than similar to 200GeV, gamma-ray emission from inverse Compton scattering of CMB photons is expected to dominate the dark matter annihilation signal from clusters, and our gamma-ray limits exclude large regions of the parameter space that would give a good fit to the recent anomalous Pamela and Fermi-LAT electron-positron measurements. We also present constraints on the annihilation of more standard dark matter candidates, such as the lightest neutralino of supersymmetric models. The constraints are particularly strong when including the fact that clusters are known to contain substructure at least on galaxy scales, increasing the expected gammaray flux by a factor of similar to 5 over a smooth-halo assumption. We also explore the effect of uncertainties in cluster dark matter density profiles, finding a systematic uncertainty in the constraints of roughly a factor of two, but similar overall conclusions. In this work, we focus on deriving limits on dark matter models; a more general consideration of the Fermi-LAT data on clusters and clusters as gamma-ray sources is forthcoming.

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