Updated Search for Spectral Lines from Galactic Dark Matter Interactions with Pass 8 Data from the Fermi Large Area Telescope

Dark matter in the Milky Way may annihilate directly into gamma rays, producing a monoenergetic spectral line. Therefore, detecting such a signature would be strong evidence for dark matter annihilation or decay. We search for spectral lines in the Fermi Large Area Telescope observations of the Milk...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:arXiv.org 2015-05
Main Author: The Fermi-LAT Collaboration
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Dark matter
Gamma rays
Line spectra
Milky Way
Searching
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Dark matter in the Milky Way may annihilate directly into gamma rays, producing a monoenergetic spectral line. Therefore, detecting such a signature would be strong evidence for dark matter annihilation or decay. We search for spectral lines in the Fermi Large Area Telescope observations of the Milky Way halo in the energy range 200 MeV to 500 GeV using analysis methods from our most recent line searches. The main improvements relative to previous works are our use of 5.8 years of data reprocessed with the Pass 8 event-level analysis and the additional data resulting from the modified observing strategy designed to increase exposure of the Galactic center region. We searched in five sky regions selected to optimize sensitivity to different theoretically-motivated dark matter scenarios and find no significant detections. In addition to presenting the results from our search for lines, we also investigate the previously reported tentative detection of a line at 133 GeV using the new Pass 8 data.
ISSN:2331-8422
DOI:10.48550/arxiv.1506.00013