Fitting the Gamma-Ray Spectrum from Dark Matter with DMFIT: GLAST and the Galactic Center Region

TL;DR

This paper evaluates GLAST's ability to detect and analyze dark matter via gamma-ray signals from the Galactic center, introducing DMFIT for fitting dark matter models to gamma-ray data.

Contribution

It presents DMFIT, a novel tool for fitting gamma-ray spectra from dark matter annihilation, and assesses GLAST's potential to determine dark matter properties.

Findings

GLAST can detect dark matter signals with one year of data.

DMFIT can estimate dark matter mass and annihilation channels.

Systematic effects impact the accuracy of property reconstruction.

Abstract

We study the potential of GLAST to unveil particle dark matter properties with gamma-ray observations of the Galactic center region. We present full GLAST simulations including all gamma-ray sources known to date in a region of 4 degrees around the Galactic center, in addition to the diffuse gamma-ray background and to the dark matter signal. We introduce DMFIT, a tool that allows one to fit gamma-ray emission from pair-annihilation of generic particle dark matter models and to extract information on the mass, normalization and annihilation branching ratios into Standard Model final states. We assess the impact and systematic effects of background modeling and theoretical priors on the reconstruction of dark matter particle properties. Our detailed simulations demonstrate that for some well motivated supersymmetric dark matter setups with one year of GLAST data it will be possible not only to significantly detect a dark matter signal over background, but also to estimate the dark matter mass and its dominant pair-annihilation mode.