Abstract
If dark matter is composed of weakly interacting particles with mass in the GeV-TeV range, their annihilation or decay may produce gamma rays that could be detected by gamma-ray telescopes. Observations of dwarf spheroidal satellite galaxies of the Milky Way (dSphs) benefit from the relatively accurate predictions of dSph dark matter content to produce robust constraints to the dark matter properties. The sensitivity of these observations for the search for dark matter signals can be optimized thanks to the use of advanced statistical techniques able to exploit the spectral and morphological peculiarities of the expected signal. In this paper, I review the status of the dark matter searches from observations of dSphs with the current generation of gamma-ray telescopes: Fermi-LAT, H.E.S.S, MAGIC, VERITAS and HAWC. I will describe in detail the general statistical analysis framework used by these instruments, putting in context the most recent experimental results and pointing out the most relevant differences among the different particular implementations. This will facilitate the comparison of the current and future results, as well as their eventual integration in a multi-instrument and multi-target dark matter search.
Highlights
The existence of a dominant non-baryonic, neutral, cold matter component in the Universe, called dark matter, has been postulated in order to explain the kinematics of galaxies in galaxy clusters [1] and stars in spiral galaxies [2], as well as the power spectrum of temperature anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background [3]
At non-cosmological scales, gamma rays are essentially unaffected by energy losses, which would preserve the features expected for dark matter annihilation and/or decay spectra, which depend on the values of the dark matter mass and the branching ratios to the different annihilation/decay channels, which could be studied
We find the large collection area, given by the size of the Cherenkov light pool projected on the plane of the telescope reflector
Summary
The existence of a dominant non-baryonic, neutral, cold matter component in the Universe, called dark matter, has been postulated in order to explain the kinematics of galaxies in galaxy clusters [1] and stars in spiral galaxies [2], as well as the power spectrum of temperature anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background [3]. Given how most of the known dSphs sit on relatively clean interstellar environments (i.e., out of the Galactic plane, where the particle densities, cosmic ray fluxes and radiation fields are small), the expected gamma-ray signal would come from well-understood prompt processes. The distribution of dark matter within the halo, ρ( p, l ), is usually estimated by solving the spherical Jeans equation for the stellar kinematic data [16] Using this technique, several authors have produced catalogues of J-factors for the different known dSphs. A detailed review about the expected dark matter content and distribution of the known dSphs can be found elsewhere in this volume
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