Dark Matter Searches with Astroparticle Data

By Troy A. Porter, Robert P. Johnson, P. Graham. 2011

139 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The existence of dark matter (DM) was first noticed by Zwicky in the 1930s, but its nature remains one of the great unsolved problems of physics. A variety of observations indicate that it is nonbaryonic and nonrelativistic. One of the preferred candidates for nonbaryonic DM is a weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP) that in most models is stable. WIMP self-annihilation can produce cosmic rays, gamma rays, and other particles with signatures that may be detectable. Hints of anomalous cosmic-ray spectra found by recent experiments, such as PAMELA, have motivated interesting interpretations in terms of DM annihilation and/or decay. However, these signatures also have standard astrophysical interpretations, so additional evidence is needed in order to make a case for detection of DM annihilation or decay. Searches by the Fermi-LAT for gamma-ray signals from clumps, nearby dwarf spheroidal galaxies, and galaxy clusters have also been performed, along with measurements of the diffuse Galactic and extragalactic gammaray emission. In addition, Imaging Air Cherenkov Telescopes like HESS, MAGIC, and VERITAS have reported on searches for gamma-ray emission from dwarf galaxies. In this review, we examine the status of searches for particle DM by these instruments and discuss the interpretations and resulting DM limits.

Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2bb9ec2c31815950de26fe16b1f0cee3cc5add65

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In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

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Citations in the corpus

• A database of charged cosmic rays (2013, background): “In the last twenty years, anti-protons Article published by EDP Sciences A32, page 1 of 13 and positron fraction measurements have also become a strong probe for dark matter indirect searches (e.g., Porter et al. 2011; Lavalle & Salati 2012).”
• Core Cosmology Library: Precision Cosmological Predictions for LSST (2018, background): “These data will also allow us to shed light on a number of open questions in fundamental physics, such as the nature of dark matter (Feng 2010; Porter et al. 2011), the mass of neutrinos (Wong 2011; Lesgourgues & Pastor 2012a; Allison et al. 2015) or the level of primordial non-Gaussianity (Dalal…”
• Galactic Searches for Dark Matter (2012, methodology): “There are a number of excellent recent reviews on theoretical aspects of particle dark matter (Bertone et al., 2005; Hooper and Baltz, 2008; Feng, 2010a; Bergstrom, 2012) and experimental searches using astroparticle data (Gaitskell, 2004; Porter et al., 2011).”