Searches for Particle Dark Matter with gamma-rays.

by Jan Conrad (Stockholm University)

Monday 12 Nov 2012, 11:00 → 12:00 Europe/Zurich

500/1-001 - Main Auditorium (CERN)

In this contribution I review the present status and discuss some prospects for indirect detection of dark matter with gamma-rays. Thanks to the Fermi Large Area Telescope, searches in gamma-rays have reached sensitivities that allow to probe the most interesting parameter space of the weakly interacting massive particles (WIMP) paradigm. This gain in sensitivity is naturally accompanied by a number of detection claims or indications, the most recent being the claim of a line feature at a dark matter particle mass of ∼ 130 GeV at the Galactic Centre, a claim which requires confirmation from the Fermi-LAT collaboration and other experiments, for example HESS II or the planned Gamma-400 satellite. Predictions for the next generation air Cherenkov telescope, Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA), together with forecasts on future Fermi-LAT constraints arrive at the exciting possibility that the cosmological benchmark cross-section could be probed from masses of a few GeV to a few TeV. Consequently, non-detection would pose a challenge to the WIMP paradigm, but the reached sensitivities also imply that --optimistically-- a detection is in the cards.

Video preview

Poster CERNEPSeminar12.11.2012.pdf

Slides CERN_2012_Conrad.pdf CERN_2012_Conrad.ppt

Video in CDS Video in CDS