Palestrante
Descrição
The elusive nature of dark matter remains one of the biggest mysteries in the standard model of cosmology (Lambda-CDM), astrophysics, and particle physics. One method to investigate dark matter is through its indirect detection, which relies on the assumption that dark matter particles can self-annihilate or decay, producing stable standard model particles as byproducts. These byproducts should be observed using observatories that detect gamma rays, neutrinos, and cosmic rays. By analyzing data from sources expected to contain significant amounts of dark matter, we can derive limits on the dark matter parameter space. Among celestial bodies, the galactic center and dwarf galaxies are the most significant targets. The galactic center has the highest dark matter density in our vicinity, while dwarf galaxies are systems dominated by dark matter and are relatively close to us. Another possibility is to look into secluded models for long-lived mediators, which would allow the observation of gamma rays from the Sun on Earth resulting from the annihilation of dark matter in the Sun's core. The Southern Wide-field Gamma-ray Observatory (SWGO) will be a wide-field water Cherenkov detector located in South America, between 10 and 30 degrees south latitude, covering an energy range from GeV up to the PeV scale. Our findings show that SWGO observations of the galactic center, dwarf galaxies and the Sun will provide unprecedented sensitivity to the detection of WIMP dark matter with multi-TeV masses, surpassing the current instruments by more than one order of magnitude.
