OKC colloquia

Modeling Bright Gamma Ray Lines

by M. Reece (Harvard)

Europe/Stockholm
Description
The recent observation of a gamma ray line in Fermi-LAT data may or may not prove to be a signal of dark matter, but already it has inspired interesting new models of how dark matter can behave. I will first summarize why some of the simplest models for fitting such a bright line appear to require significant tuning or very large couplings. Then I will offer an alternative model in which dark matter consists of hidden sector pions that annihilate to box-shaped gamma ray features. Finally, I will ask whether dark matter could be distributed in significantly different ways within the galaxy than we have traditionally thought, explaining the idea of "Double-Disk Dark Matter," in which a fraction of all dark matter behaves much more like baryons within galaxies than like ordinary collisionless dark matter. This scenario is interesting in much more general contexts than the possible line signal, and suggests several new avenues of research.