Explaining the AMS positron excess via Right-handed Neutrinos

TL;DR

This paper proposes that right-handed neutrinos from a decaying two-component dark matter model can explain the AMS-02 positron excess, fitting the data well and addressing previous model shortcomings.

Contribution

It introduces a novel decaying dark matter scenario involving right-handed neutrinos governed by the type I seesaw mechanism to explain cosmic-ray excess.

Findings

Good fit to AMS-02 data with chi-squared around 1.12 in optimistic case.

Decaying dark matter masses around 2 TeV and 300 GeV fit the positron excess.

Model addresses limitations of previous dark matter and pulsar explanations.

Abstract

We have witnessed in the past decade the observation of a puzzling cosmic-ray excess at energies larger than $10$ GeV. The AMS-02 data published this year has new ingredients such as the bump around $300$ GeV followed by a drop at $800$ GeV, as well as smaller error bars. Adopting the background used by the AMS-02 collaboration in their analysis, one can conclude that previous explanations to the new AMS-02 such as one component annihilating and decaying dark matter as well as pulsars seem to fail at reproducing the data. Here, we show that in the right-handed neutrino portal might reside the answer. We discuss a decaying two-component dark matter scenario where the two-body decay products are right-handed neutrinos that have their decay pattern governed by the type I seesaw mechanism. This setup provides a very good fit to data, for example, for a conservative approach including just statistical uncertainties leads to $\chi^2/d.o.f \sim 2.3$ for $m_{DM_1}=2150$ GeV with $\tau_{1}=3.78 \times 10^{26}$ s and $m_{DM_2}=300$ with $\tau_{2}=5.0 \times 10^{27}$ s for $M_N=10$ GeV, and, in an optimistic case, including systematic uncertainties, we find $\chi^2/d.o.f \sim 1.12$, for $M_N = 10$ GeV, with $m_{DM_1}=2200$ GeV with $\tau_{1}=3.8 \times 10^{26}$ s and $m_{DM_2}=323$ GeV with $\tau_{2}=1.68 \times 10^{27}$ s.