Two new avenues in dark matter indirect detection

by Dr Ranjan Laha (Stanford University and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory)

Thursday 23 Mar 2017, 14:30 → 15:30 Asia/Kolkata

AG69

Indirect detection is one of the major ways to search for dark matter. However, backgrounds have been a major problem for these searches. In this talk, I will introduce two new techniques to distinguish signal from background. Firstly, I will show how telescopes with ∼ 0.1% energy resolution can exploit the Doppler shift of sharp photon features arising from dark matter interactions and separate the signal from background. The technique is general and I will give an example of this search strategy with the 3.5 keV line. In the second half of my talk, I will show how limits from the searches for very high energy photons can be used to constrain dark matter interactions. Using this observable, I will constrain very heavy dark matter which is very difficult to constrain using other means.