Physics Events

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Small Hall, Room 111
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Abstract: The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is an ideal observatory to search for the annihilation/decay of dark matter particles in the cosmos. The primary instrument on board the spacecraft is a particle detector optimized to measure the arrival directions and energies of high energy photons (20 MeV to >300 GeV) and also charged cosmic rays. Many theories of dark matter involve the possibility of annihilation and/or decay into standard model particles, which could be detected by Fermi and thereby provide indirect evidence for the particle nature of dark matter. However, any exotic signal must be distinguished from more conventional astrophysical processes: the Galactic sea of cosmic rays, unresolved gamma-ray emission from our Milky Way and beyond, and specific sites of particle acceleration including black holes, pulsars, and supernova remnants. I will discuss several indirect dark matter search strategies and present results using more than three years of on-orbit data.