Enhanced lines and box-shaped features in the gamma-ray spectrum from annihilating dark matter in the NMSSM

TL;DR

This paper investigates gamma-ray spectral features from dark matter annihilation in the NMSSM, highlighting differences between neutralino and right-handed sneutrino DM and their detectability through gamma-ray lines and other searches.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of gamma-ray spectral features in the NMSSM, including the impact of resonances and Higgs contributions, and compares these with current experimental limits.

Findings

RH sneutrino DM constraints can surpass dwarf galaxy bounds due to resonance effects.

Neutralino DM shows limited gamma-ray spectral feature enhancement, mainly near Z boson resonance.

Some NMSSM scenarios are testable by upcoming direct detection experiments.

Abstract

We study spectral features in the gamma-ray emission from dark matter (DM) annihilation in the Next-to-Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (NMSSM), with either neutralino or right-handed (RH) sneutrino DM. We perform a series of scans over the NMSSM parameter space, compute the DM annihilation cross section into two photons and the contribution of box-shaped features, and compare them with the limits derived from the Fermi-LAT search for gamma-ray lines using the latest Pass 8 data. We implement the LHC bounds on the Higgs sector and on the masses of supersymmetric particles as well as the constraints on low-energy observables. We also consider the recent upper limits from the Fermi-LAT satellite on the continuum gamma-ray emission from dwarf spheroidal galaxies (dSphs). We show that in the case of the RH sneutrino the constraint on gamma-ray spectral features can be more stringent than the dSph bounds. This is due to the Breit-Wigner enhancement near the ubiquitous resonances with a CP even Higgs and the contribution of scalar and pseudoscalar Higgs final states to box-shaped features. By contrast, for neutralino DM, the di-photon final state is only enhanced in the resonance with a $Z$ boson and box-shaped features are even more suppressed. Therefore, the observation of spectral features could constitute a discriminating factor between both models. In addition, we compare our results with direct DM searches, including the SuperCDMS and LUX limits on the elastic DM-nucleus scattering cross section and show that some of these scenarios would be accessible to next generation experiments. Thus, our findings strengthen the idea of complementarity among distinct DM search strategies.