Till Steinbring Universität Würzburg, Lehrstuhl für Astronomie

Generic cold dark matter annihilation spectrum including prompt gamma rays, inverse Compton, and synchrotron radiation (pdf)

The indirect detection of dark matter relies on the a priori knowledge of the spectrum emitted by the annihilation products. We have obtained a generic spectrum by averaging simulation runs with DARKSUSY for 10^6 different cosmologically interesting dark matter candidates. We point out that in addition to the prompt gamma rays due to the decay of neutral pions, photons also result from inverse Compton scattering of background light, in particular from the cosmic microwave background and the starlight, and from synchrotron radiation. The generic total dark matter annihilation spectrum thus shows a number of distinct peaks and a separation of the peaks that scales with the square of the dark matter mass scale. As an example, we show how this generic spectrum can be constrained with multifrequency observations of M87.