Gamma-ray Constraints on Hadronic and Leptonic Activities of Decaying Dark Matter

Understand

While the excess in cosmic-ray electrons and positrons reported by PAMELA and Fermi may be explained by dark matter decaying primarily into charged leptons, this does not necessarily mean that dark matter should not have any hadronic decay modes.

• In order to quantify the allowed hadronic activities, we derive constraints on the decay rates of dark matter into WW, ZZ, hh, qqbar and gg using the Fermi and HESS gamma-ray data.
• We also derive gamma-ray constraints on the leptonic e+e-, mu+mu- and tau+tau- final states.
• We find that dark matter must decay primarily into mu+mu- or tau+tau- in order to simultaneously explain the reported excess and meet all gamma-ray constraints.