Metastable dark matter mechanisms for INTEGRAL 511 keV γ rays and DAMA/CoGeNT events

We explore dark matter mechanisms that can simultaneously explain the galactic 511 keV gamma rays observed by INTEGRAL/SPI, the DAMA/LIBRA annual modulation, and the excess of low-recoil dark matter candidates observed by CoGeNT. It requires three nearly degenerate states of dark matter in the 4-7 GeV mass range, with splittings, respectively, of order MeV and a few keV. The top two states have the small mass gap and transitions between them, either exothermic or endothermic, and can account for direct detections. Decays from one of the top states to the ground state produce low-energy positrons in the Galaxy whose associated 511 keV gamma rays are seen by INTEGRAL. This decay can happen spontaneously, if the excited state is metastable (longer lived than the age of the Universe), or it can be triggered by inelastic scattering of the metastable states into the shorter-lived ones. We focus on a simple model where the dark matter is a triplet of an SU(2) hidden sector gauge symmetry, broken at the scale of a few GeV, giving masses of order ≲1GeV to the dark gauge bosons, which mix kinetically with the standard model hypercharge. The purely decaying scenario can give the observed angular dependence of the 511 keV signal with no positron diffusion, while the inelastic scattering mechanism requires transport of the positrons over distances ∼1kpc before annihilating. We note that an x-ray line of several keV in energy, due to single-photon decays involving the top dark matter states, could provide an additional component to the diffuse x-ray background. The model is testable by proposed low-energy fixed-target experiments.