Discriminating different scenarios to account for the cosmicexcess by synchrotron and inverse Compton radiation
- 17 July 2009
- journal article
- research article
- Published by American Physical Society (APS) in Physical Review D
- Vol. 80 (2), 023007
- https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevd.80.023007
Abstract
The excesses of the cosmic positron fraction recently measured by PAMELA and the electron spectra by ATIC, PPB-BETS, Fermi, and H.E.S.S. indicate the existence of primary electron and positron sources. The possible explanations include dark matter annihilation, decay, and astrophysical origin, like pulsars. In this work we show that these three scenarios can all explain the experimental results of the cosmic excess. However, it may be difficult to discriminate these different scenarios by the local measurements of electrons and positrons. We propose possible discriminations among these scenarios through the synchrotron and inverse Compton radiation of the primary electrons/positrons from the region close to the Galactic center. Taking typical configurations, we find the three scenarios predict quite different spectra and skymaps of the synchrotron and inverse Compton radiation, though there are relatively large uncertainties. The most prominent differences come from the energy band for synchrotron emission and for inverse Compton emission. It might be able to discriminate at least the annihilating dark matter scenario from the other two given the high precision synchrotron and diffuse -ray skymaps in the future.
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