Has AMS-02 Observed Two-Component Dark Matter?

Abstract

There is convincing observational evidence for an increasing cosmic-ray positron-to-electron ratio at energies larger than $\sim 10$~GeV, at odds with expectations from secondary positron production. The most recent AMS-02 data exhibit an interesting spectral feature consisting of a bump at an energy around $300$~GeV followed by a drop around $\sim 800$~GeV. A possible explanation to the most recent data is that the excess positron originates from decaying dark matter. Here, we show that models consisting of two dark matter particle species contributing equally to the global cosmological dark matter density provide strikingly good fits to the data. The favored models, with a best-fit with $\chi^2/d.o.f \sim 0.5$ consist of a first species weighing $750$~GeV decaying with a lifetime $\tau_{\chi}\sim 10^{26}$~s to $\tau$ lepton pairs (or to a pair of vector bosons subsequently decaying to a $\tau$ pair each), and a second species with a mass around 2.3 TeV decaying to $\mu$ lepton pairs. We provide a few possible concrete realizations for this scenario.