Ruling Out Spiky WIMP Dark Matter using Indirect Searches

Abstract: The dark matter (DM) density profile in the innermost region of the Galaxy remains an open question. In particular, while adiabatic growth of the supermassive black hole Sgr A$^\ast$ at the Galactic Center (GC) can induce a 'spike' in central DM density, the existence of such a spike is still under debate. Here we present new constraints on the spike slope $γ_{\rm sp}$ using conventional DM indirect detection searches. We first recast existing photon and neutrino line searches, which include the contribution from the GC region, into constraints on the thermally-averaged DM annihilation cross section $\langleσv\rangle$ in the presence of a DM spike. We then derive new bounds on the spike profile for a generic Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP) DM scenario, where the thermal freeze-out mechanism fixes the annihilation cross-section at $\langleσv\rangle\sim (2-3) \times 10^{-26}~{\rm cm}^3~{\rm s}^{-1}$. We find that for DM annihilation to photons, constraints from Fermi-LAT and MAGIC rule out spike profiles at the GC for a broad range of WIMP DM masses from 10 GeV to 100 TeV. Our result holds even if the photon channel constitutes only $1\%$ of the total annihilation rate. For the neutrino channel, we use the IceCube data to constrain the existence of an extremely steep spike in the $\mathscr{O}(1-10)$ TeV DM mass range. Our analysis can be easily extended to other annihilation channels.