Searches for Particle Dark Matter with gamma-rays

TL;DR

This paper reviews the current status and future prospects of detecting dark matter through gamma-ray observations, highlighting recent claims, upcoming experiments, and the potential to confirm or challenge the WIMP paradigm.

Contribution

It provides an overview of gamma-ray searches for dark matter, discusses recent detection claims, and forecasts the capabilities of future telescopes like CTA and Gamma-400.

Findings

Gamma-ray searches have reached sensitivities probing WIMP parameter space.

Recent claim of a 130 GeV gamma-ray line at the Galactic Centre.

Future telescopes could confirm or challenge the WIMP paradigm.

Abstract

In this contribution I review the present status and discuss some prospects for indirect detection of dark matter with gamma-rays. Thanks to the Fermi Large Area Telescope, searches in gamma-rays have reached sensitivities that allow to probe the most interesting parameter space of the weakly interacting massive particles (WIMP) paradigm. This gain in sensitivity is naturally accompanied by a number of detection claims or indications, the most recent being the claim of a line feature at a dark matter particle mass of $\sim$ 130 GeV at the Galactic Centre, a claim which requires confirmation from the Fermi-LAT collaboration and other experiments, for example HESS II or the planned Gamma-400 satellite. Predictions for the next generation air Cherenkov telescope, Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA), together with forecasts on future Fermi-LAT constraints arrive at the exciting possibility that the cosmological benchmark cross-section could be probed from masses of a few GeV to a few TeV. Consequently, non-detection would pose a challenge to the WIMP paradigm, but the reached sensitivities also imply that --optimistically-- a detection is in the cards.