Dynamical Dark Matter and the positron excess in light of AMS results

Keith R. Dienes, Jason Kumar, Brooks Thomas

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

45 Scopus citations

Abstract

The AMS-02 experiment has recently released data which confirms a rise in the cosmic-ray positron fraction as a function of energy up to approximately 350 GeV. Over the past decade, attempts to interpret this positron excess in terms of dark-matter decays have become increasingly complex and have led to a number of general expectations about the decaying dark-matter particles: such particles cannot undergo simple two-body decays to leptons, for example, and they must have rather heavy TeV-scale masses. In this paper, by contrast, we show that Dynamical Dark Matter can not only match existing AMS-02 data on the positron excess, but also accomplish this feat with significantly lighter dark-matter constituents undergoing simple two-body decays to leptons. Moreover, we demonstrate that this can be done without running afoul of numerous other competing constraints from FERMI and Planck on decaying dark matter. Finally, we demonstrate that the Dynamical Dark Matter framework makes a fairly robust prediction that the positron fraction should level off and then remain roughly constant out to approximately 1 TeV, without experiencing any sharp downturns. Indeed, if we interpret the positron excess in terms of decaying dark matter, we find that the existence of a plateau in the positron fraction at energies less than 1 TeV may be taken as a "smoking gun" of Dynamical Dark Matter.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article number103509
JournalPhysical Review D - Particles, Fields, Gravitation and Cosmology
Volume88
Issue number10
DOIs
StatePublished - Nov 8 2013
Externally publishedYes

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Nuclear and High Energy Physics
  • Physics and Astronomy (miscellaneous)

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