Dark matter annihilation at cosmological redshifts: possible relic signal from annihilation of weakly interacting massive particles

Anton N. Baushev

Published 2008-06-18, updated 2009-10-08Version 4

We discuss the possibility to observe the products of dark matter annihilation that was going on in the early Universe. Of all the particles that could be generated by this process we consider only photons, as they are both uncharged and easily detectable. The earlier the Universe was, the higher the dark matter concentration $n$ and the annihilation rate (proportional to $n^2$) were. However, the emission from the very early Universe cannot reach us because of the opacity. The main part of the signal was generated at the moment the Universe had just become transparent for the photons produced by the annihilation. Thus, the dark matter annihilation in the early Universe should have created a sort of relic emission. We obtain its flux and the spectrum. If weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) constitute dark matter, it is shown that we may expect an extragalactic gamma-ray signal in the energy range 0.5 - 20 {MeV} with a maximum near 8 {MeV}. We show that an experimentally observed excess in the gamma-ray background at 0.5 - 20 {MeV} could be created by the relic WIMPs annihilation only if the dark matter structures in the universe had appeared before the universe became transparent for the annihilation products ($z \simeq 300$). We discuss in more detail physical conditions whereby this interpretation could be possible.