The morphology of exciting dark matter and the galactic 511 keV signal

Abstract We study the morphology of the 511 keV signal that could be produced by exciting dark matter (XDM) in the Milky Way. In this model, collisions between dark matter particles excite the dark matter to a state that can then decay back to the ground state, releasing an electron-positron pair. These electrons and positrons would then annihilate, producing 511 keV photons that could explain the 511 keV signal seen by INTEGRAL at the Galactic Center. We compare the resulting flux with the most recent INTEGRAL data, performing the first full statistical analysis of the exciting dark matter model. We focus on exciting dark matter in the mass and cross section ranges 100 GeV ≲ m χ ≲ 3 TeV and 10 -19 cm 3 s -1 〈 σv 〉 10 -16 cm 3 s -1 . We show that exciting dark matter can provide a significantly better fit than the simpler case of annihilating dark matter, with Δ χ 2 > 16 for all but one of the density profiles we consider.