Sommerfeld Enhancement from Background Force and the Galactic Center GeV Excess
Abstract
We study the impact of background-induced forces on dark matter (DM) annihilation and their implications for indirect detection. In the presence of a finite number density of background particles, loop-level interactions can generate an effective force that is significantly enhanced relative to the vacuum case. We construct a two-component DM model in which the dominant component is a fermionic particle and the subdominant component is an ultralight pseudoscalar particle . The annihilation of proceeds through the p-wave channel and produces gamma-ray emission. The finite density of particles induces a background-enhanced force between particles, leading to a sizable Sommerfeld enhancement of the annihilation. We show that a viable region of parameter space in this model can account for the gamma-ray excess observed in the Galactic Center using Fermi-LAT data. The background-induced force substantially amplifies the Sommerfeld enhancement and thus enlarges the parameter space capable of explaining the excess, highlighting the importance of background effects in astrophysical environments.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2512.24188,
title = {Sommerfeld Enhancement from Background Force and the Galactic Center GeV Excess},
author = {Yu Cheng and Shuailiang Ge},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.24188},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
15 pages, 4 figures