Licentiate Thesis: Dark Matter searches targeting Dwarf Spheroidal Galaxies with the Fermi Large Area Telescope

by Ms Maja Llena Garde (Oskar Klein Centre, Stockholm University)

Wednesday 14 Mar 2012, 13:15 → 15:00 Europe/Stockholm

FB54

In this licentiate thesis I report on our recent work on gamma-ray searches for dark matter with the Fermi Large Area Telescope (Fermi-LAT), and doc- ument some of the many tests we made while developing the method. We target dwarf spheroidal galaxies since they are considered to be very dark matter dominated systems. We use a joint likelihood method to target ten dwarf galaxies simultaneously, and this method allows us to rule out WIMP annihilation with cross sections predicted by the most generic cosmological calculation (~ 3 • 10-26 cm3 s-1) up to a mass of ~ 30 GeV for the bb and the ז+ז annihilation channel, without assuming any boost factors. I brie y de- scribe some of the evidence for dark matter, the Fermi-LAT, dwarf spheroidal galaxies, likelihood analysis, and the analysis of Fermi-LAT data.