# TeV Particle Astrophysics 2016

Sep 12 – 16, 2016
CERN
Europe/Zurich timezone
There is a live webcast for this event.

## The Primary Importance of Secondaries: Gamma-Ray Detectability of MeV Dark Matter

Sep 16, 2016, 3:00 PM
20m
6/2-024 - BE Auditorium Meyrin (CERN)

### 6/2-024 - BE Auditorium Meyrin

#### CERN

120
Show room on map
Oral Contributions Dark matter (indirect detection)

### Speaker

Richard Bartels (University of Amsterdam)

### Description

The past two decades have seen a rapid development of $\gamma$-ray astronomy, in particular at energies above a few hundred MeV where Fermi-LAT has revolutionised the field. As a result, extensive studies have been undertaken to characterise gamma-ray annihilation spectra of dark matter with masses above $\sim 1 \mathrm{\,GeV}$. However, due to the lacking sensitivity of current experiments at lower energies, the so-called MeV gap, MeV dark matter has been much less studied. At these mass scales the main annihilation channels are to either neutrinos, electrons, pions or directly to photons. The electron channel has been extensively studied in the context of the 511 keV line. In this work, we study the general prospects for detecting MeV dark matter annihilating predominantly to electrons and positrons. We emphasise the importance of the often overlooked bremsstrahlung and in-flight annihilation spectral features, which in many cases provide the dominant $\gamma$-ray signal in this regime.

### Primary authors

Christoph Weniger (University of Amsterdam) Richard Bartels (University of Amsterdam)