Looking Under a Better Lamppost: MeV-scale Dark Matter Candidates

Dr. Regina Caputo

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

The era of precision cosmology has revealed that about 85% of the matter in the universe is dark matter. Two well-motivated candidates are weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) and weakly interacting sub-eV particles (WISPs) (e.g. axions). Both WIMPs and WISPs possess distinct gamma-ray signatures. Over the last decade, data taken between 50 MeV to >300 GeV by the Fermi Large Area Telescope (Fermi-LAT) have provided stringent constraints on both classes of dark matter models. Thus far, there are no conclusive detections. However, there is an intriguing gamma-ray excess associated with the Galactic center that could be explained by WIMP annihilation. At lower energies, the poor angular resolution of the Fermi-LAT makes source identification challenging, inhibiting our ability to more sensitively probe both the Galactic center excess, as well as lower-mass WIMP and WISP models. Additionally, targeted WISP searches (e.g., those probing supernovae and blazars) would greatly benefit from enhanced energy resolution and polarization measurements in the MeV range. To address these issues, a new telescope that is optimized for MeV observations is needed. Such an instrument would allow us to explore new areas of dark matter parameter space and provide unprecedented access to its particle nature.