Theory seminar. Beauty and the beast: Dark matter searches in the sky

Christoph Weniger, University of Amsterdam

One of the major challenges of astroparticle research is to uncover the particle nature of dark matter. Weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) are the most popular candidates and currently scrutinized by a large number of experiments. In particular indirect searches for the self-annihilation products of WIMPs in the gamma- and cosmic-ray sky are a promising avenue to follow. I will discuss different techniques that aim at an identification of a dark matter contribution over the astrophysical background, recent claims for dark matter signals in the Fermi LAT data, and challenges for future experiments.