TAPIR Seminar

The indirect, gravitational evidence for dark matter is deep, but an understanding the nature of this matter is a major unsolved problem of modern theoretical physics. If the origin of cosmic dark matter is through thermal production during the big bang, then colliding dark matter particles throughout the cosmos may continue to annihilate today at a low rate, injecting annihilation products into space. Telescopes today are searching for evidence of this annihilation radiation in high energy gamma-rays, neutrinos, and other cosmic rays.

In this talk, I will show examples of how different particle physics properties of dark matter affect the intensity spectrum of its annihilation products, and the angular power spectrum of diffuse radiation. I'll focus on gamma-ray and neutrino signals for which there are contributions both from within the galaxy and from all extragalactic annihilations. I will explain the important aspects of dark matter phase space that affect the signals, and discuss some scenarios under which the uncertainties regarding the distribution of dark matter can be constrained if an annihilation
signal is detected.