Thesis

Indirect detection of dark matter in the galaxy

• Call:

  PT-CERN Call 2022/2

• Academic Year:

  2022

• Domain:

  Astroparticle Physics

• Supervisor:

  Rui Santos

• Co-Supervisor:

  Milada Margarete Mühlleitner

• Institution:

  FCUL (Universidade de Lisboa)

• Host Institution:

  CFTC - Centro de Física Teórica e Computacional

• Abstract:

  The search for Dark Matter (DM) is one of the main goals of present high energy physics and astrophysics experiments. A large number of direct and indirect detection experiments together with searches at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have so far provided only bounds on the DM mass and couplings. In recent years the community has invested in building a large number of different experiments to indirectly search for dark matter. These experiments cover an energy range from below the MeV to above the EeV. The searches include neutrino telescopes, searches with X-Rays, Gamma Rays, Micro and Radio Waves and Charged Cosmic Rays. They will therefore provide a comprehensive scan of a very wide range of possible dark matter candidates. In fact, the next decade will be that of indirect searches for DM. The groups at the Centro de Física Teórica e Computacional da Universidade de Lisboa (CFTC-UL) and Karlsruher Institut für Technologie (KIT) have a vast experience in extensions of the Standard Model (SM) where a dark sector is included. The dark sectors have been investigated by the group in direct detection and LHC observables both at tree-level and at next-to-leading order. A number of codes that soon will be available for the community are being built by the group to optimize the searches. The plan of the thesis is to start from simple extensions of the Standard Model (SM) and understand what is the contribution that each experiment can give to probe the dark matter sector of the model. The already available code MadDM will be used as our starting point and new modules will be developed to deal with the experiments that are still not accounted for in the code.