Sep 8 – 13, 2013
Asilomar, California
US/Pacific timezone

Indirect Dark Matter Searches with VERITAS

Sep 11, 2013, 7:30 PM
2h 30m
Asilomar, California

Asilomar, California

Asilomar Conference Grounds, 800 Asilomar Avenue, Pacific Grove, CA 93950-3704
Poster Dark Matter Poster Session

Speaker

Dr Daniel Nieto (Columbia University)

Description

The standard model of cosmology requires dark matter (DM) to account for the 83% of the total mass density of the Universe. Assuming that the DM is composed of self-annihilating weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), its nature could be unraveled through the detection of the annihilation products, including photons with energies up to the WIMP mass. Annihilation of WIMPs with masses larger than 50 GeV could therefore produce very high energy gamma rays, potentially detectable by ground-based gamma-ray telescopes like VERITAS. We report on the VERITAS DM Program, an extensive set of observations of well motivated targets for indirect DM detection: dwarf spheroidal galaxies orbiting the Milky Way, the Galactic Center, and galactic DM subhalo candidates amongst the unassociated Fermi-LAT sources. We present VERITAS exclusion regions obtained on the thermally averaged annihilation cross section of the WIMP derived from these observations.

Primary author

Dr Daniel Nieto (Columbia University)

Presentation materials

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