Galactic searches for dark matter

Abstract

For nearly a century, more mass has been measured in galaxies than is contained in the luminous stars and gas. Through continual advances in observations and theory, it has become clear that the dark matter in galaxies is not comprised of known astronomical objects or baryonic matter, and that identification of it is certain to reveal a profound connection between astrophysics, cosmology, and fundamental physics. The best explanation for dark matter is that it is in the form of a yet undiscovered particle of nature, with experiments now gaining sensitivity to the most well-motivated particle dark matter candidates. In this article, I review measurements of dark matter in the Milky Way and its satellite galaxies and the status of Galactic searches for particle dark matter using a combination of terrestrial and space-based astroparticle detectors, and large scale astronomical surveys. I review the limits on the dark matter annihilation and scattering cross sections that can be extracted from both astroparticle experiments and astronomical observations, and explore the theoretical implications of these limits. I discuss methods to measure the properties of particle dark matter using future experiments, and conclude by highlighting the exciting potential for dark matter searches during the next decade, and beyond.

Dynamical Models for the Sculptor Dwarf Spheroidal in a ΛCDM Universe

“…In recent years, data of the required quality have been obtained for a number of nearby dwarf spheroidal galaxies (dSphs) around the Milky Way (Simon & Geha 2007;) and M31 (Tollerud et al 2012). Simple dynamical analyses based on spherical symmetry and the Jeans equations suffer from degeneracies that preclude an unambiguous determination of the dark matter potential  (Strigari 2013;Walker 2013). Thus, data for several dSphs have been shown to be equally consistent with flat central profiles (cores)  (Gilmore et al 2007) or with NFW cusps (Strigari et al 2010;Jardel & Gebhardt 2013).…”

Sommerfeld-enhanced J -factors for dwarf spheroidal galaxies

“…The dark matter halo masses of dSphs are well constrained from stellar kinematics [2][3][4][5], and the systematic uncertainties associated with the expected backgrounds [6] are relatively small compared with other astrophysical targets and channels used in indirect detection. Null detection results from Fermi-LAT place strong limits on the dark matter annihilation cross section for particles with mass 100 GeV [7,8], ruling out thermal relic dark matter for velocity-independent cross sections to some final states.…”

Dark matter complementarity and theZ′portal

“…WIMPs can naturally account for the observed DM abundance in the framework of standard thermal freeze-out, and they are often within reach of current and future experiments (see Ref. [1][2][3] for extensive overviews on particle DM).…”