Flavor Structure of the Cosmic-Ray Electron/Positron Excesses at DAMPE

TL;DR

This paper analyzes DAMPE's cosmic-ray electron/positron spectrum, revealing a hidden excess and proposing a new flavor-dependent dark matter annihilation mechanism to explain both the excesses.

Contribution

It introduces a novel explanation for the CRE excesses involving specific lepton flavor structures in dark matter interactions.

Findings

Identifies a hidden excess in the 0.6-1.1 TeV range of DAMPE data.

Proposes a new mechanism involving 1.5 TeV muon events decaying into electrons.

Constrains dark matter-lepton coupling ratios based on observed excesses.

Abstract

The Dark Matter Particle Explorer (DAMPE) satellite detector announced its first result for measuring the cosmic-ray electron/positron (CRE) energy spectrum up to 4.6TeV, including a tentative peak-like event excess at (1.3-1.5)TeV. In this work, we uncover a significant hidden excess in the DAMPE CRE spectrum over the energy range (0.6-1.1)TeV, which has a non-peak-like structure. We propose a new mechanism to explain this excess by a set of 1.5TeV $\mu^\pm$ events with subsequent decays into $e^\pm$ plus neutrinos. For explaining this new excess together with the peak excess around 1.4TeV, we demonstrate that the {\it flavor structure} of the original lepton final-state produced by dark matter (DM) annihilations (or other mechanism) should have a composition ratio $N_e : (N_\mu +\frac{1}{6}N_\tau) = 1 : y$, with $y \simeq 2.6-10.8$. For lepton portal DM models, this puts important constraint on the lepton-DM-mediator couplings $\lambda_e : (\lambda_\mu^4 + \frac{1}{6}\lambda_\tau^4)^{\frac{1}{4}} = 1 : y^{\frac{1}{4}}$ with a narrow range $y^{\frac{1}{4}} \simeq 1.3-1.8$.