Annihilating dark matter and the galactic positron excess

Abstract

The possibility that the Galactic dark matter is composed of neutralinos that are just above half the $Z^o$ mass is examined, in the context of the Galactic positron excess. In particular, we check if the anomalous bump in the cosmic ray positron to electron ratio at $10~GeV$ can be explained with the ``decay'' of virtual $Z^o$ bosons produced when the neutralinos annihilate. We find that the low energy behaviour of our prediction fits well the existing data. Assuming the neutralinos annihilate primarily in the distant density concentration in the Galaxy and allowing combination of older, diffused positrons with young free-streaming ones, produces a fit which is not satisfactory on its own but is significantly better than the one obtained with homogeneous injection.

To appear in the proceedings of the INFN Eloisatron Project 44th Workshop On QCD At Cosmic Energies: The Highest Energy Cosmic Rays And QCD, 29 Aug - 5 Sep 2004, Erice, Italy