A search for spectral lines from WIMP annihilation in the milky way using the Fermi large area telescope
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- The most popular class of dark matter candidates is the class of weakly-interacting massive particles (WIMPs). The Fermi Large Area Telescope has the possibility of indirectly detecting WIMPs by the flux from their annihilation/decay products. When a WIMP annihilates or decays directly into a photon gamma and another particle Y the photons are monochromatic. Detection of the resulting spectral line(s) would provide convincing evidence for particulate dark matter and could provide the WIMP mass. In the case of no detection, knowledge of the dark matter distribution can be used to place limits on the annihilation cross section and lifetime for the WIMP(s) to Y-gamma channel. We present the spectrum from 4.8 to 264 GeV and spectral line flux upper limits, obtained from a subset of this spectrum, from 7 to 200 GeV. The spatial region of the dataset covers a large portion of the sky, the high latitudes plus the Galactic Center. We report upper limits on the WIMP cross sections for annihilation to gamma-gamma and Z-gamma and lower limits on the WIMP lifetime for decay to gamma-neutrino. We discuss the implications of the spectrum and line flux limits for several dark matter models with optimistic branching ratios for photon channels.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2011 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Edmonds, Yvonne Vasetta | |
|---|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Physics | |
| Primary advisor | Bloom, E. (Elliott) | |
| Thesis advisor | Bloom, E. (Elliott) | |
| Thesis advisor | Allen, Steven G | |
| Thesis advisor | Funk, Stefan, 1974- | |
| Advisor | Allen, Steven G | |
| Advisor | Funk, Stefan, 1974- |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Yvonne Vasetta Edmonds. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Physics. |
| Thesis | Ph.D. Stanford University 2011 |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2011 by Yvonne Vasetta Edmonds
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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