Speaker
Description
The two most favored explanations of the Fermi Galactic Center gamma-ray
excess (GCE) are millisecond pulsars and self annihilation of the smooth dark matter halo
of the galaxy. In order to distinguish between these possibilities, we would like to optimally
use all information in the available data, including photon direction and energy information.
To date, analyses of the GCE have generally treated directional and energy information
separately, or have ignored one or the other completely. We have developed a method for
analyzing the GCE that relies on simulation-based inference with neural posterior models
to jointly analyze photon directional and spectral information while correctly accounting for
the spatial and energy resolution of the telescope, here assumed to be the Fermi Large Area
Telescope (LAT). These results also have implications for analyses of the diffuse gamma-ray
background.
