Revival of the Dark Matter Hypothesis for the Galactic Center Gamma-Ray Excess
Name
PhysRevLett.123.241101.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
286.13 KB
Format
Unknown
Checksum (MD5)
c74a5636507d00a0abb107aec922a82a
Author(s)
Leane, Rebecca K
Slatyer, Tracy R
Date Issued
2019
Journal
Physical Review Letters
Publisher
American Physical Society (APS)
Version
Final published version
Abstract
© 2019 American Physical Society. Statistical evidence has previously suggested that the galactic center GeV excess (GCE) originates largely from point sources, and not from annihilating dark matter. We examine the impact of unmodeled source populations on identifying the true origin of the GCE using non-Poissonian template fitting (NPTF) methods. In a proof-of-principle example with simulated data, we discover that unmodeled sources in the Fermi bubbles can lead to a dark matter signal being misattributed to point sources by the NPTF. We discover striking behavior consistent with a mismodeling effect in the real Fermi data, finding that large artificial injected dark matter signals are completely misattributed to point sources. Consequently, we conclude that dark matter may provide a dominant contribution to the GCE after all.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Center for Theoretical Physics
Terms of Use
Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1103/PHYSREVLETT.123.241101
