Speaker
Description
The quest for dark matter detection remains one of modern physics' greatest challenges, with indirect methods gaining prominence.
While gamma-ray observations have led the way in searches for Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs), radio astronomy opens exciting new possibilities for detecting their annihilation or decay signatures.
The Local Group dwarf galaxies are pristine laboratories for such searches. Leveraging MeerKAT's exceptional sensitivity and resolution, we explore detecting synchrotron emission from WIMP produced secondary electron-positrons.
Radio astronomy is complementary to other searches and sensitive to lower frequencies that corresponds to the lower WIMP masses. More dishes, longer frequency bands, and extended observations enable detection of the smallest structures and faintest emissions from dark matter. This makes it a very promising arena as upcoming interferometers feature more dishes and higher speed surveys, dramatically enhancing our capability to probe signatures of dark matter.
We present upper limits on the annihilation cross-section and mass of the WIMPs for two MeerKAT observed dwarf galaxies: the irregular LMC and the spheroidal Reticulum II. Both Milky Way satellites with different characteristics (gaseous with an extended HI disk and gas-void with no recent star formation, respectively) and are well-studied dark matter dominated objects.
Our results demonstrate the the compelling potential in radio interferometers in advancing our understanding of dark matter and the significance of the dwarfs of the Local Group as prime targets for such searches.
| Stream | Science or Engineering |
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