13–17 Aug 2013
University of California, Santa Cruz
US/Pacific timezone

Search for Gamma-ray Spectral Lines with the Fermi Large Area Telescope and Dark Matter Implications

16 Aug 2013, 09:20
20m
Classroom Unit 2 (University of California, Santa Cruz)

Classroom Unit 2

University of California, Santa Cruz

oral presentation Physics Beyond the Standard Model Physics Beyond the Standard Model

Speaker

Dr Andrea Albert (The Ohio State University)

Description

There is overwhelming evidence that non-baryonic dark matter constitutes ~27% of the energy density of the universe. Weakly Interacting Massive Particles are promising dark matter candidates that may produce monochromatic gamma rays via annihilation or decay. Such interactions would produce a narrow spectral line in the Galactic diffuse gamma-ray energy spectrum. We have searched for spectral lines in the energy range 5--300 GeV using 3.7 years of data, reprocessed with updated instrument calibrations and an improved energy dispersion model compared to the previous Fermi-LAT Collaboration line searches. We searched in five regions selected to optimize sensitivity to different theoretically-motivated dark matter density distributions. We did not find any globally significant lines in our a priori search regions and will present 95% confidence limits for WIMP annihilation cross sections and decay lifetimes. We will also discuss potential systematic effects in this search and why the significance of the line-like feature near 130 GeV is less than reported in other works.
APS member ID 61104117

Primary author

Dr Andrea Albert (The Ohio State University)

Presentation materials