Abstract: | The reported galactic center gamma-ray excess has a distribution and rate suggestive of an origin in dark matter annihilations. However, the conventional DM annihilation channels into standard model b quarks or tau leptons are increasingly in tension with various experimental constraints on antiproton and positron fluxes. I'll discuss a framework that is free from such constraints. The key idea is that the mediators between the dark matter and the SM are themselves part of a strongly coupled sector: a hidden valley. DM annihilation produces a dark hadron shower that in turn decays to photons, but without significant associated emission of other SM matter. I'll also discuss an explicit realization of this framework, its phenomenology, as well as pertinent cosmological, astrophysical and collider bounds.
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