A Spectroscopic Search for Optical Emission Lines from Dark Matter Decay

We search for narrow-line optical emission from dark matter decay by stacking dark-sky spectra from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) at the redshift of nearby galaxies from DESI's Bright Galaxy and Luminous Red Galaxy samples. Our search uses regions separated by 5 to 20 arcsecond from the centers of the galaxies, corresponding to an impact parameter of approximately $50\,\rm kpc$. No unidentified spectral line shows up in the search, and we place a line flux limit of $10^{-19}\,\rm{ergs}/\rm{s}/\rm{cm}^{2}/\rm{arcsec}^{2}$ on emissions in the optical band ($3000\lesssim\lambda\lesssim9000 \,\mathring{\rm A}$), which corresponds to $34$ in AB magnitude in a normal broadband detection. This detection limit suggests that the line surface brightness contributed from all dark matter along the line of sight is two orders of magnitude lower than the measured extragalactic background light (EBL), which rules out the possibility that narrow optical-line emission from dark matter decay is a major source of the EBL.