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Indirect Search for Dark Matter in the Universe - the Multiwavelength and Multiobject Approach
(2011)
Cold dark matter constitutes a basic tenet of modern cosmology, essential for our understanding of structure formation in the Universe. Since its first discovery by means of spectroscopic observations of the dynamics of the Coma cluster some 80 years ago, mounting evidence of its gravitational pull and its impact on the geometry of space-time has build up across a wide range of scales, from galaxies to the entire Hubble flow. The apparent lack of electromagnetic coupling and independent measurements of the energy density of baryonic matter from the primordial abundances of light elements show the non-baryonic nature of dark matter, and its clustering properties prove that it is cold, i.e. that it has a temperature lower than its mass during the time of radiation-matter equality. A generic particle candidate for cold dark matter are weakly interacting massive particles at the electroweak symmetry-breaking scale, such as the neutralinos in R-parity conserving supersymmetry. Such particles would naturally freeze-out with a cosmologically relevant relic density at early times in the expanding Universe. Subsequent clustering of matter would recover annihilation interactions between the dark matter particles to some extent and thus lead to potentially observable high-energy emission from the decaying unstable secondaries produced in annihilation events. The spectra of the secondaries would permit a determination of the mass and annihilation cross section, which are crucial for the microphysical identification of the dark matter. This the central motivation for indirect dark matter searches. However, presently neither the indirect searches, nor the complementary direct searches based on the detection of elastic scattering events, nor the production of candidate particles in collider experiments, has yet provided unequivocal evidence for dark matter. This does not come as a surprise, since the dark matter particles interact only through weak interactions and therefore the corresponding secondary emission must be extremely faint. It turns out that even for the strongest mass concentrations in the Universe, the dark matter annihilation signal is expected to not exceed the level of competing astrophysical sources. Thus, the discrimination of the putative dark matter annihilation signal from the signals of the astrophysical inventory has become crucial for indirect search strategies. In this thesis, a novel search strategy will be developed and exemplified in which target selection across a wide range of masses, astrophysical background estimation, and multiwavelength signatures play the key role. It turns out that the uncertainties regarding the halo profile and the boost due to surviving substructure are bigger for halos at the lower end of the observed mass scales, i.e. in the regime of dwarf galaxies and below, while astrophysical backgrounds tend to become more severe for massive dark matter halos such as clusters of galaxies. By contrast, the uncertainties due to unknown details of particle physics are invariant under changes of the halo mass. Therefore, the different scaling behaviors can be employed to significantly cut down on the uncertainties in observations of different targets covering a major part of the involved mass scales. This strategical approach was implemented in the scientific program carried out with the MAGIC telescope system. Observations of dwarf galaxies and the Virgo- and Perseus clusters of galaxies have been carried out and, at the time of writing, result in some of the most stringent constraints on weakly interacting massive particles from indirect searches. Here, the low-threshold design of the MAGIC telescope system plays a crucial role, since the bulk of the high-energy photons, produced with a high multiplicity during the fragmentation of unstable dark matter annihilation products, are emitted at energies well below the dark matter mass scale. The upper limits severely constrain less generic, but more prolific scenarios characterized by extraordinarily high annihilation efficiencies.