Abstract:

A signal of dark matter annihilation in our Galaxy could provide the first window into the missing matter of the Universe. I plan to discuss the current status of such searches with data from the Fermi Large Area Telescope, and their implications for models of dark matter. My primary focus will be on the development of a new analysis technique that takes advantage of photon-count statistics to distinguish astrophysical point sources from a potential dark-matter signal. By applying this analysis to data from the Inner Galaxy, we have found that the excess of GeV photons previously observed can be accounted for by a population of unresolved point sources, disfavoring the dark-matter hypothesis. I will present updates on this analysis and discuss recent work applying the same techniques to the Isotropic Gamma Ray Background, where there is the potential to significantly push the sensitivity reach for thermal dark matter.