Dark Matter Signals from Cascade Annihilations

A leading interpretation of the electron/positron excesses seen by PAMELA and ATIC is dark matter annihilation in the galactic halo. Depending on the annihilation channel, the electron/positron signal could be accompanied by a galactic gamma ray or neutrino flux, and the non-detection of such fluxes constrains the couplings and halo properties of dark matter. In this paper, we study the interplay of electron data with gamma ray and neutrino constraints in the context of cascade annihilation models, where dark matter annihilates into light degrees of freedom which in turn decay into leptons in one or more steps. Electron and muon cascades give a reasonable fit to the PAMELA and ATIC data. Compared to direct annihilation, cascade annihilations can soften gamma ray constraints from final state radiation by an order of magnitude. However, if dark matter annihilates primarily into muons, the neutrino constraints are robust regardless of the number of cascade decay steps. We also examine the electron data and gamma ray/neutrino constraints on the recently proposed "axion portal" scenario.Comment: 36 pages, 11 figures, 7 tables; references adde

First Sagittarius A* Event Horizon Telescope Results. VII. Polarization of the Ring

The Event Horizon Telescope observed the horizon-scale synchrotron emission region around the Galactic center supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), in 2017. These observations revealed a bright, thick ring morphology with a diameter of 51.8 ± 2.3 μas and modest azimuthal brightness asymmetry, consistent with the expected appearance of a black hole with mass M ≈ 4 × 106 M ⊙. From these observations, we present the first resolved linear and circular polarimetric images of Sgr A*. The linear polarization images demonstrate that the emission ring is highly polarized, exhibiting a prominent spiral electric vector polarization angle pattern with a peak fractional polarization of ∼40% in the western portion of the ring. The circular polarization images feature a modestly (∼5%–10%) polarized dipole structure along the emission ring, with negative circular polarization in the western region and positive circular polarization in the eastern region, although our methods exhibit stronger disagreement than for linear polarization. We analyze the data using multiple independent imaging and modeling methods, each of which is validated using a standardized suite of synthetic data sets. While the detailed spatial distribution of the linear polarization along the ring remains uncertain owing to the intrinsic variability of the source, the spiraling polarization structure is robust to methodological choices. The degree and orientation of the linear polarization provide stringent constraints for the black hole and its surrounding magnetic fields, which we discuss in an accompanying publication