No Arabic abstract
We calculate the limits on the fraction of viable dark matter minihalos in the early universe to host Population III.1 stars, surviving today as dark matter spikes in our Milky Way halo. Motivated by potential hints of light dark matter from the DAMA and CoGeNT direct dark matter searches, we consider thermal relic WIMP dark matter with masses of 5, 10, and 20 GeV, and annihilation to mu^+ mu^-, tau^+ tau^-, and q bar{q}. From this brief study we conclude that, if dark matter is light, either the typical black hole size is lesssim 100 M_odot (i.e. there is no significant Dark Star phase), and/or dark matter annihilates primarily to mu^+ mu^- or other final states that result in low gamma-ray luminosity, and/or that an extremely small fraction of minihalos in the early universe that seem suitable to host the formation of the first stars actually did.
The first published Fermi large area telescope (Fermi-LAT) measurement of the isotropic diffuse gamma-ray emission is in good agreement with a single power law, and is not showing any signature of a dominant contribution from dark matter sources in the energy range from 20 to 100 GeV. We use the absolute size and spectral shape of this measured flux to derive cross section limits on three types of generic dark matter candidates: annihilating into quarks, charged leptons and monochromatic photons. Predicted gamma-ray fluxes from annihilating dark matter are strongly affected by the underlying distribution of dark matter, and by using different available results of matter structure formation we assess these uncertainties. We also quantify how the dark matter constraints depend on the assumed conventional backgrounds and on the Universes transparency to high-energy gamma-rays. In reasonable background and dark matter structure scenarios (but not in all scenarios we consider) it is possible to exclude models proposed to explain the excess of electrons and positrons measured by the Fermi-LAT and PAMELA experiments. Derived limits also start to probe cross sections expected from thermally produced relics (e.g. in minimal supersymmetry models) annihilating predominantly into quarks. For the monochromatic gamma-ray signature, the current measurement constrains only dark matter scenarios with very strong signals.
We develop a formalism that allows one to systematically calculate the WIMP annihilation rate into gamma rays whose energy far exceeds the weak scale. A factorization theorem is presented which separates the radiative corrections stemming from initial state potential interactions from loops involving the final state. This separation allows us to go beyond the fixed order calculation, which is polluted by large infrared logarithms. For the case of Majorana WIMPs transforming in the adjoint representation of SU(2), we present the result for the resummed rate at leading double log accuracy in terms of two initial state partial wave matrix elements and one hard matching coefficient. For a given model, one may calculate the cross section by calculating the tree level matching coefficient and determining the value of a local four fermion operator. We find that the effects of resummation can be as large as 100% for a 20 TeV WIMP. The generalization of the formalism to other types of WIMPs is discussed.
Annihilation of dark matter particles in cosmological halos (including a halo of the Milky Way) contributes to the diffuse gamma-ray background (DGRB). As this contribution will appear anisotropic in the sky, one can use the angular power spectrum of anisotropies in DGRB to constrain properties of dark matter particles. By comparing the updated analytic model of the angular power spectrum of DGRB from dark matter annihilation with the power spectrum recently measured from the 22-month data of Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT), we place upper limits on the annihilation cross section of dark matter particles as a function of dark matter masses. We find that the current data exclude <sigma v> >~ 10^{-25} cm^3 s^{-1} for annihilation into bbar{b} at the dark matter mass of 10 GeV, which is a factor of three times larger than the canonical cross section. The limits are weaker for larger dark matter masses. The limits can be improved further with more Fermi-LAT data as well as by using the power spectrum at lower multipoles (l <~ 150), which are currently not used due to a potential Galactic foreground contamination.
We study the Generalized Chaplygin gas model (GCGM) using Gamma-ray bursts as cosmological probes. In order to avoid the so-called circularity problem we use cosmology-independent data set and Bayesian statistics to impose constraints on the model parameters. We observe that a negative value for the parameter $alpha$ is favoured if we adopt a flat Universe and the estimated value of the parameter $H_{0}$ is lower than that found in literature.
One aspect of the quantum nature of spacetime is its foaminess at very small scales. Many models for spacetime foam are defined by the accumulation power $alpha$, which parameterizes the rate at which Planck-scale spatial uncertainties (and thephase shifts they produce) may accumulate over large path-lengths. Here $alpha$ is defined by theexpression for the path-length fluctuations, $delta ell$, of a source at distance $ell$, wherein $delta ell simeq ell^{1 - alpha} ell_P^{alpha}$, with $ell_P$ being the Planck length. We reassess previous proposals to use astronomical observations ofdistant quasars and AGN to test models of spacetime foam. We show explicitly how wavefront distortions on small scales cause the image intensity to decay to the point where distant objects become undetectable when the path-length fluctuations become comparable to the wavelength of the radiation. We use X-ray observations from {em Chandra} to set the constraint $alpha gtrsim 0.58$, which rules out the random walk model (with $alpha = 1/2$). Much firmer constraints canbe set utilizing detections of quasars at GeV energies with {em Fermi}, and at TeV energies with ground-based Cherenkovtelescopes: $alpha gtrsim 0.67$ and $alpha gtrsim 0.72$, respectively. These limits on $alpha$ seem to rule out $alpha = 2/3$, the model of some physical interest.