Clues for Identifying Dark Matter Through Indirect Detection
The indirect, gravitational evidence for dark matter is deep. Understanding the nature of this matter is a major unsolved problem of modern theoretical physics. One viable explanation is that it is a new fundamental particle that was produced during the big bang. In many such theories, annihilating dark matter can successfully account for the correct cosmic density of the dark matter relic that we see. If those theories are true, then colliding dark matter particles are still slowly annihilating today, injecting annihilation products into space. Telescopes today are searching for evidence of this type of signal in high energy gamma-rays, cosmic rays, and neutrinos.
In this talk, I will show examples of how different particle physics properties of dark matter affect the intensity of its annihilation products, particularly the observed mean spectrum, and the angular power spectrum. I focus on gamma-ray and neutrino signals for which there can be contributions both from within the galaxy and from all extragalactic annihilations. I will explain the important aspects of large scale structure that affect the extragalactic signal, and will briefly discuss the uncertainties of large scale structure that could be constrained by the observation of an annihilation signal.
