Low Energy INTEGRAL Positrons from eXciting Dark Matter

Abstract

The origin of the e^+e^- 511 keV line observed by INTEGRAL remains unclear. The rate and morphology of the signal have prompted questions as to whether dark matter could play a role. We explore the case of dark matter upscattering in the framework of eXciting Dark Matter (XDM), where WIMPs χ, interacting through a new dark force, scatter into excited states χ*, which subsequently emit e^+e^- pairs when they de-excite. We numerically compute the cross sections for two Yukawa-coupled DM particles upscattering into excited states, specifically considering variations motivated by recent N-body simulations with additional baryonic physics. We find that that l>0 components of the partial-wave decomposition are often significant contributions to the total cross section and that for reasonable ranges of parameters dark matter can produce the ~10^43 e^+/s observed by INTEGRAL.

24 pages, 19 figures