Ruling out dark matter interpretation of the galactic GeV excess by gamma-ray data of galaxy clusters

TL;DR

This study uses gamma-ray data from galaxy clusters to set constraints on annihilating dark matter, challenging the dark matter explanation for the Milky Way's GeV excess by providing tighter limits on annihilation cross sections.

Contribution

The paper introduces constraints from galaxy cluster data that improve existing limits on dark matter annihilation, ruling out many models explaining the Milky Way's gamma-ray excess.

Findings

Lower limits on dark matter mass range from 6 to 130 GeV depending on the channel.

Results improve Fermi-LAT limits by factors of 1.2 to 1.8 for certain channels and masses.

Most popular dark matter interpretations of the Milky Way GeV excess are ruled out.

Abstract

Recently, some very tight constraints of annihilating dark matter have been obtained from gamma-ray data of the Milky Way and Milky Way dwarf spheroidal satellite galaxies. In this article, we report that there are two excellent galaxy clusters (A2877 and Fornax) which can provide interesting constraints for annihilating dark matter. The lower limits of the dark matter mass for the thermal relic annihilation cross section are 25 GeV, 6 GeV, 130 GeV and 100 GeV respectively for the $e^+e^-$, $\mu^+\mu^-$, $\tau^+\tau^-$ and $b\bar{b}$ channels. For some configuration of our working assumptions, our results improve the Fermi-LAT upper limits of annihilation cross sections by a factor of $1.3-1.8$ for wide ranges of dark matter mass for $e^+e^-$, $\mu^+\mu^-$ and $b\bar{b}$ channels, and a factor of $1.2-1.8$ for $\tau^+\tau^-$ channel with dark matter mass $\le 100$ GeV. These limits basically rule out most of the existing popular dark matter interpretation of the GeV excess in the Milky Way.