Speaker
Regina Caputo
(University of California, Santa Cruz)
Description
The era of precision cosmology has revealed that ~80% of the total amount of matter in the universe is dark. Cosmic microwave background measurements, galactic rotation curves, and gravitational lensing each provide strong evidence for the existence of dark matter. One promising candidate, motivated by both Particle Physics and Astrophysics, is the Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP). WIMPs are predicted to produce gamma rays via annihilation or decay which are detectable by the Fermi Large Area Telescope (Fermi-LAT). A detection of gamma rays from dark matter would provide evidence of physics beyond the Standard Model. I present several recent results from the Fermi-LAT Collaboration from a variety of WIMP-like dark matter searches including the extragalactic gamma-ray background, gamma-ray excesses in dwarf spheroidal galaxies, and gamma-ray spectral lines.
Primary author
Regina Caputo
(University of California, Santa Cruz)
