Theory Seminar (High Energy/Cosmology) |
Events on Thursday, May 16th, 2013
- Dark Matter Searches Using Radio Waves and Neutrinos
- Time: 11:00 am
- Place: 5280 Chamberlin Hall
- Speaker: Ranjan Laha, Ohio State University
- Abstract: The particle nature of dark matter is one of the biggest mysteries of present day science. I will discuss some of the efforts in detecting dark matter through radio waves and neutrinos. I will first talk about the recent hint of a 130 GeV gamma-ray line from the Galactic Center in the Fermi-LAT data. I will show that current radio observations of the Galactic Center marginally constrain the interpretation of the claimed gamma lines, independent of the underlying particle physics model, for a contracted NFW profile. Radio data of the Galactic Center with existing telescopes will play an important role in confirming or ruling out the dark matter interpretation of the gamma-ray line. I will then talk about neutrinos as a probe of dark matter. Neutrinos are the best probe of TeV-scale dark matter annihilation signal and I will show that galaxy clusters are the best indirect detection target for a neutrino telescope like IceCube -- this has been recently confirmed by the IceCube collaboration. Additionally I will also show how meson decay or W decay can constrain certain models of dark matter which have been proposed recently to solve all small-scale structure problems in LambdaCDM cosmology.