Excess of High Energy Electrons Coming From Dark Matter?

While PAMELA's results still have not been published yet, it appears that another collaboration has published a similar finding that detected the surplus of high energy cosmic ray electrons that can be attributed to a particular model of dark matter.

As reported in this week's issue of Nature:

The Advanced Thin Ionization Calorimeter (ATIC), an experiment to search for charged particles from space, has spotted a surplus of high-energy electrons coming from somewhere in the cosmos. Although the interpretation is far from certain, the electrons could be produced by dark matter — previously undetected particles that physicists believe make up 85% of all matter in the Universe.

Whatever it is, this observation seems to be consistent with what PAMELA reported. We have to wait for PAMELA results to be published.

In any case, here is the complete citation for the ATIC paper:

J. Chang et al., Nature v.456, p.362 (2008).

Don't miss the News and Views article covering this work in the same issue of Nature.

Zz.