UC Berkeley

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 arcsec from the centers of the galaxies, corresponding to an impact parameter of approximately 50 kpc. No unidentified spectral line shows up in the search, and we place a line flux limit of 10-19 ergs/s/cm2/arcsec2 on emissions in the wavelength range of 2000-9000A∘. This places the tightest constraints yet on the two-photon decay of dark matter in the mass range of 5 to 12 eV, with a particle lifetime exceeding 3×1025 s. This detection limit also implies that the line surface brightness contributed from all dark matter along the line of sight is at least 2 orders of magnitude lower than the measured extragalactic background light (EBL), ruling out the possibility that narrow optical-line emission from dark matter decay is a major source of the EBL.