Iason Baldes, Francesca Calore, Kalliopi Petraki, Vincent Poireau, Nicholas L. Rodd
SciPost Phys. 9, 068 (2020) ·
published 10 November 2020
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Indirect searches for dark matter (DM) have conventionally been applied to
the products of DM annihilation or decay. If DM couples to light force
carriers, however, it can be captured into bound states via dissipation of
energy that may yield detectable signals. We extend the indirect searches to DM
bound state formation and transitions between bound levels, and constrain the
emission of unstable dark photons. Our results significantly refine the
predicted signal flux that could be observed in experiments. As a concrete
example, we use Fermi-LAT dwarf spheroidal observations to obtain constraints
in terms of the dark photon mass and energy which we use to search for the
formation of stable or unstable bound states.