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)
