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Register a new userWMAP Haze: Directly Observing Dark Matter?
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Added by
Michael McNeil Forbes
Publication date
2008
fields
Physics
and research's language is
English
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In this paper we show that dark matter in the form of dense matter/antimatter nuggets could provide a natural and unified explanation for several distinct bands of diffuse radiation from the core of the Galaxy spanning over 12 orders of magnitude in frequency. We fix all of the phenomenological properties of this model by matching to x-ray observations in the keV band, and then calculate the unambiguously predicted thermal emission in the microwave band, at frequencies smaller by 10 orders of magnitude. Remarkably, the intensity and spectrum of the emitted thermal radiation are consistent with--and could entirely explain--the so-called WMAP haze: a diffuse microwave excess observed from the core of our Galaxy by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP). This provides another strong constraint of our proposal, and a remarkable nontrivial validation. If correct, our proposal identifies the nature of the dark matter, explains baryogenesis, and provides a means to directly probe the matter distribution in our Galaxy by analyzing several different types of diffuse emissions.
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Gamma rays and microwave observations of the Galactic Center and surrounding areas indicate the presence of anomalous emission, whose origin remains ambiguous. The possibility of dark matter (DM) annihilation explaining both signals through prompt emission at gamma-rays and secondary emission at microwave frequencies from interactions of high-energy electrons produced in annihilation with the Galactic magnetic fields has attracted much interest in recent years. We investigate the DM interpretation of the Galactic Center gamma-ray excess by searching for the associated synchrotron in the WMAP-Planck data. Considering various magnetic field and cosmic-ray propagation models, we predict the synchrotron emission due to DM annihilation in our Galaxy, and compare it with the WMAP-Planck data at 23-70GHz. In addition to standard microwave foregrounds, we separately model the microwave counterpart to the Fermi Bubbles and the signal due to DM, and use component separation techniques to extract the signal associated with each template from the total emission. We confirm the presence of the Haze at the level of 7% of the total sky intensity at 23GHz in our chosen region of interest, with a harder spectrum $I sim u^{-0.8}$ than the synchrotron from regular cosmic-ray electrons. The data do not show a strong preference towards fitting the Haze by either the Bubbles or DM emission only. Inclusion of both components provides a better fit with a DM contribution to the Haze emission of 20% at 23GHz, however, due to significant uncertainties in foreground modeling, we do not consider this a clear detection of a DM signal. We set robust upper limits on the annihilation cross section by ignoring foregrounds, and also report best-fit DM annihilation parameters obtained from a complete template analysis. We conclude that the WMAP-Planck data are consistent with a DM interpretation of the gamma-ray excess.
We consider the prospects for multiple dark matter direct detection experiments to determine if the interactions of a dark matter candidate are isospin-violating. We focus on theoretically well-motivated examples of isospin-violating dark matter (IVDM), including models in which dark matter interactions with nuclei are mediated by a dark photon, a Z, or a squark. We determine that the best prospects for distinguishing IVDM from the isospin-invariant scenario arise in the cases of dark photon- or Z-mediated interactions, and that the ideal experimental scenario would consist of large exposure xenon- and neon-based detectors. If such models just evade current direct detection limits, then one could distinguish such models from the standard isospin-invariant case with two detectors with of order 100 ton-year exposure.
It was proposed that the two phenomena, WMAP-Planck haze and Fermi bubbles, may have a common origin. In the present paper we analyze the spatial structure of the haze using the Planck 2018 data release. It is found that the spatial dimensions and locations of WMAP-Planck haze and Fermi bubbles are compatible within the experimental uncertainties. No substructures similar to the Fermi bubbles cocoon are identified in the Planck data. Comparison with the spatial extent of possible synchrotron emission caused by the electron-positron pair emitted by the Galactic center pulsar population and by the decay of dark matter particles in the Galactic center region are performed. Both galactic pulsars and dark matter decay remain viable explanations of the WMAP-Planck haze.
Over the past decades, several ideas and technologies have been developed to directly detect WIMP from the galactic halo. All these detection strategies share the common goal of discriminating a WIMP signal from the residual backgrounds. By directly detecting WIMPs, one can measure some or all of the observables associated to each nuclear recoil candidates, such as their energy and direction. In this study, we compare and examine the discovery potentials of each readout strategies from counting only (bubble chambers) to directional detectors (Time Projection Chambers) with 1d-, 2d-, and 3d-sensitivity. Using a profile likelihood analysis, we show that, in the case of a large and irreducible background contamination characterized by an energy distribution similar to the expected WIMP signal, directional information can improve the sensitivity of the experiment by several orders of magnitude. We also found that 1d directional detection is only less effective than a full 3d directional sensitivity by about a factor of 3, or 10 if we assume no sense recognition, still improving by a factor of 2 or more if only the energy of the events is being measured.
The extraction of a haze from the WMAP microwave skymaps is based on subtraction of known foregrounds, viz. free-free (bremsstrahlung), thermal dust and synchrotron, each traced by other skymaps. While the 408 MHz all-sky survey is used for the synchrotron template, the WMAP bands are at tens of GHz where the spatial distribution of the radiating cosmic ray electrons ought to be quite different because of the energy-dependence of their diffusion in the Galaxy. The systematic uncertainty this introduces in the residual skymap is comparable to the claimed haze and can, for certain source distributions, have a very similar spectrum and latitudinal profile and even a somewhat similar morphology. Hence caution must be exercised in interpreting the haze as a physical signature of, e.g., dark matter annihilation in the Galactic centre.
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