| A model of dark matter excitations is studied in an attempt to explain the anomalously large 511 keV photon line emission observed by the SPI spectrograph on INTEGRAL to be originating from the galactic bulge of the Milky Way. The proposed dark matter WIMP has a near degenerate mass partner a few MeV heavier. Scattering between dark matter particles leads to excitations, with the subsequent decays producing an electron-positron pair. In this way, the kinetic energy of the massive dark matter particles can be efficiently converted into electron-positron pairs moving slow enough to produce the narrow annihilation line observed. With a sufficiently large mass gap, kinematic considerations and the cuspy dark matter density profile constrain excitations to the galactic bulge where the escape velocity, and thus the fraction of dark matter particles above the kinematic cutoff, is large. |
