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Title:
Gamma-ray probes of higgsino dark matter
Speaker:
Abstract:
WIMP dark matter remains a well-motivated paradigm to explain the observed relic abundance of cold dark matter. The higgsino and the wino are arguably the two simplest implementations of this paradigm, with the dark matter placed either in the fundamental or the adjoint representation of SU(2)_L, respectively. The wino, however, is in tension with indirect detection constraints. Thus, the higgsino remains one of the last minimal dark matter candidates that has yet to seriously be probed experimentally. In addition to being a minimal dark matter candidate, higgsino dark matter would not be unexpected from the point of view of, for example, mini-split type theories of supersymmetry near the electroweak scale. In this talk I will discuss how gamma-ray data from the Fermi Large Area Telescope may already be used to search for evidence of higgsino dark matter annihilation. I will present results of the most sensitive search to-date for higgsinos with Fermi data, which tantalizingly shows a small fluctuation over the null hypothesis that could consistently arise from higgsino dark matter with the expected annihilation cross-section. I will discuss how existing data from the H.E.S.S. telescope could potentially already be used to verify this signal, if analyzed in the correct way, and how the higgsino model will be more definitively tested with data from the upcoming Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA).
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