Speaker
Nicholas Rodd
(Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)
Description
This talk will review the status of the Galactic Center Excess (GCE). Discovered fifteen years ago in Fermi data, the GCE appears almost exactly as WIMP dark matter annihilations were predicted to emerge in gamma rays. Despite this and the fact that the excess is seen at high significance, its exact nature remains unclear. I will discuss the status of various aspects of the excess that could weigh on whether it is genuinely the first particle signature of dark matter or instead of astrophysical origin. These include the spatial morphology of the excess and the robustness of efforts to identify a point-source origin for the emission, the latter being a direction where machine learning approaches appear particularly promising.
Primary author
Nicholas Rodd
(Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)
