PAMELA, DAMA, INTEGRAL and Signatures of Metastable Excited WIMPs

TL;DR

This paper explores models of dark matter with GeV-scale mediators and MeV-scale excited states, explaining various astrophysical signals and predicting long-lived excited states with detectable signatures in upcoming direct detection experiments.

Contribution

It introduces new models involving metastable excited WIMPs and analyzes their implications for astrophysical signals and experimental detection, including long-lived states and high-energy down-scattering signatures.

Findings

Long-lived excited states can have relic abundances up to 1% for 1 TeV WIMPs.

Upcoming direct detection experiments can significantly lower constraints on excited state populations.

Models predict high-energy signals peaking at ~1 MeV, outside usual search windows, detectable at future experiments.

Abstract

Models of dark matter with ~ GeV scale force mediators provide attractive explanations of many high energy anomalies, including PAMELA, ATIC, and the WMAP haze. At the same time, by exploiting the ~ MeV scale excited states that are automatically present in such theories, these models naturally explain the DAMA/LIBRA and INTEGRAL signals through the inelastic dark matter (iDM) and exciting dark matter (XDM) scenarios, respectively. Interestingly, with only weak kinetic mixing to hypercharge to mediate decays, the lifetime of excited states with delta < 2 m_e is longer than the age of the universe. The fractional relic abundance of these excited states depends on the temperature of kinetic decoupling, but can be appreciable. There could easily be other mechanisms for rapid decay, but the consequences of such long-lived states are intriguing. We find that CDMS constrains the fractional relic population of ~100 keV states to be <~ 10^-2, for a 1 TeV WIMP with sigma_n = 10^-40 cm^2. Upcoming searches at CDMS, as well as xenon, silicon, and argon targets, can push this limit significantly lower. We also consider the possibility that the DAMA excitation occurs from a metastable state into the XDM state, which decays via e+e- emission, which allows lighter states to explain the INTEGRAL signal due to the small kinetic energies required. Such models yield dramatic signals from down-scattering, with spectra peaking at high energies, sometimes as high as ~1 MeV, well outside the usual search windows. Such signals would be visible at future Ar and Si experiments, and may be visible at Ge and Xe experiments. We also consider other XDM models involving ~ 500 keV metastable states, and find they can allow lighter WIMPs to explain INTEGRAL as well.