Evidence Of Dark Matter Annihilations In The WMAP Haze

Abstract

The WMAP experiment has revealed an excess of microwave emission from the region around the center of our Galaxy. It has been suggested that this signal, known as the ``WMAP Haze'', could be synchrotron emission from relativistic electrons and positrons generated in dark matter annihilations. In this letter, we revisit this possibility. We find that the angular distribution of the WMAP Haze matches the prediction for dark matter annihilations with a cusped density profile, $\rho (r)\propto r^{-1.2}$ in the inner kiloparsecs. Comparing the intensity in different WMAP frequency bands, we find that a wide range of possible WIMP annihilation modes are consistent with the spectrum of the haze for a WIMP with a mass in the 100 GeV to multi-TeV range. Most interestingly, we find that to generate the observed intensity of the haze, the dark matter annihilation cross section is required to be approximately equal to the value needed for a thermal relic, $\sigma v\sim 3\times 10^{-26}$ cm${}^3$/s. No boost factors are required. If dark matter annihilations are in fact responsible for the WMAP Haze, and the slope of the halo profile continues into the inner Galaxy, GLAST is expected to detect gamma rays from the dark matter annihilations in the Galactic Center if the WIMP mass is less than several hundred GeV.

4 pages, 3 figures

References in corpus (1)

• The Role of Antimatter Searches in the Hunt for Supersymmetric Dark Matter

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• Interpreting the recent results on direct search for dark matter particles in terms of relic neutralino
• Multi-wavelength signals of dark matter annihilations at the Galactic center
• Strategies for Determining the Nature of Dark Matter
• Extracting the Gamma Ray Signal from Dark Matter Annihilation in the Galactic Center Region
• Constraining Supersymmetric Dark Matter With Synchrotron Measurements
• Prospects For Detecting Dark Matter With GLAST In Light Of The WMAP Haze
• Dark Matter and LHC: What is the Connection?
• Neutralino Dark Matter from Indirect Detection Revisited
• Upper bounds on signals due to WIMP self--annihilation: comments on the case of the synchrotron radiation from the galactic center and the WMAP haze