"Hunting supersymmetric dark matter in gamma-rays"
Zhaoyu Yang (OSU/CCAPP)
Annihilation or decay of dark matter can produce continuum or monoenergetic gamma-rays. Substantial progress has been made in the searches for dark matter through gamma-rays since the launch of the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. The Fermi-LAT has measured gamma rays with unprecedented accuracy and statistics in the GeV-TeV energy range. The experiment starts to enter the intriguing regions of parameter space where supersymmetric particles could provide dark matter candidates. I will briefly review the extensive searches for gamma-rays from dark matter with the Fermi-LAT and also discuss the complementarity between indirect, direct and collider searches.
"A Census of AGN Activity in the Bootes Field"
Sun Mi Chung (Astronomy)
AGN are crucial probes of the accretion history of black holes in the universe and the co-evolution of AGN and galaxies. In order to find statistically meaningful samples of AGN, large surveys are necessary. Typically these surveys have covered a large area in the sky with a relatively bright apparent magnitude limit (I<~21), or have gone very deep (I<~25) but cover only a small region of the sky. The Bootes field, with its deep optical imaging (I<~25) and ~9 square degree field, offers a unique opportunity to study AGN and galaxy evolution from a survey that is both deep and wide. By utilizing the extensive multi-wavelength data in the Bootes field, we are able to construct spectral energy distributions (SEDs) that range from UV to mid-IR wavelengths. We fit the SEDs with existing galaxy and AGN templates and present a novel way to select AGN candidates.
