2021 Fiscal Year Annual Research Report
Closing in on the ultimate Dark Matter limits forecast by the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope
| Project/Area Number |
20K14463
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| Research Institution | The University of Tokyo |
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Principal Investigator |
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| Project Period (FY) |
2020-04-01 – 2022-03-31
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| Keywords | Dark matter / Gamma rays / Galactic center / CTA / Fermi GeV excess / Pulsars |
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| Outline of Annual Research Achievements |
(1) Abazajian et. al. (2020): In this paper, we exploited the state-of-the-art astrophysical background model constructed in previous work to examine what may still be attributed to dark matter annihilation in the “Fermi GeV excess” data. Since the expected dark matter emission in the Galactic center region is so large and the data does not require a dark matter template, we have been able to obtain the most stringent constraints on particle dark matter available in the literature (for approximately GeV-scale dark matter masses). Even with conservative assumptions for the astrophysical emission and dark matter profiles, our derived DM limits are more constraining than those from Milky Way dwarfs and exclude the thermal relic annihilation cross section out to masses of approximately 300 GeV.
(2) Macias et al. (2021): In this work we have run high-resolution simulations of the electrons/positrons injected by either millisecond pulsars or dark matter. Our simulations show that there are significant morphological differences in the predicted gamma ray maps for both sources. We found that CTA has the necessary sensitivity to detect the high-energy tail of the “Fermi GeV excess” for physically plausible electron acceleration efficiencies. Furthermore, in the event that CTA observes an excess of diffuse gamma rays in the Galactic center, it will be able to discriminate between the dark matter and millisecond pulsar hypotheses.
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Research Products
(16 results)
