- June 12, 2017, 2:00 pm US/Central
- Regina Caputo, University of Maryland/NASA/GAFC
The era of precision cosmology has revealed that ~80% of the total amount of matter in the universe is dark matter. One promising candidate, motivated by both particle physics and astrophysics, is the Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP). WIMPs are predicted to produce gamma rays via annihilation or decay which are detectable by the Fermi Large Area Telescope (Fermi-LAT). Indirect searches such as this complement direct and collider (production) searches and are necessary to fully investigate the particle nature of dark matter. For nearly nine years, Fermi-LAT has been surveying the sky in the energy range 20 MeV to >300 GeV from low Earth orbit. I present several recent results from the Fermi-LAT Collaboration for a variety of indirect search targets, including the neighboring galaxies and the Galactic center. I will also discuss the prospects for future searches with the Fermi-LAT and future gamma-ray telescopes.