Event

The idea that dark matter is nothing more than a “heavy neutrino” that froze out after reheating has long been a seductive one. Indirect detection experiments are just now entering an era where the simplest candidate thermal relic models can be excluded. We will survey the status of current & near-future observations of the galactic center and dwarf spheroidal galaxies to rule on low-dimensional representations of SU(2) as dark matter. This will include preliminary results from my collaborators and I at the VERITAS telescope in southern Arizona showing a new limit on wino dark matter from our study of dwarf spheroidal satellite galaxies of the Milky Way.  We will then discuss efforts to build and test a wider class of thermal-relic candidates whose mass can range up to the Planck scale.