Volume 358 - 36th International Cosmic Ray Conference (ICRC2019) - DM - Dark Matter
Dark Matter Searches with HAWC
J. Lundeen,* J.P. Harding
*corresponding author
Full text: pdf
Pre-published on: 2019 July 22
Published on:
Abstract
The High Altitude Water Cherenkov Observatory (HAWC) is a high energy (500 GeV to 100 TeV) gamma ray detector located in central Mexico. HAWC has both a wide ($\approx$ 2 sr) field of view and near continuous duty cycle, making it ideal for unbiased sky surveys and analysis of highly extended sources. We make use of HAWC's survey abilities to search for dark matter signals originating from the Milky Way Galaxy. By taking an unbiased sample of the sky, we set characteristic upper limits on dark matter annihilation flux for various dark matter masses and annihilation channels as a function of declination. These characteristic limits are then combined with models of the dark matter spatial distribution in order to calculate the HAWC sensitivity to gamma-ray emission from both dark matter substructure and the main Galactic halo. We use this sensitivity to optimize a search for dark matter emission from the main Galactic halo.
Open Access