Dark Studies- J.A.R. Cembranos

Friday 9 Jan 2015, 11:00 → 12:00 Europe/Brussels

E/1st floor-E.161 - Meeting room (E.161) (Marc de Hemptinne (chemin du Cyclotron, 2, Louvain-la-Neuve))

Establishing the fundamental nature of dark matter is one of the most important theoretical questions in fundamental physics, and the search for dark matter is one of the top priorities in experimental physics today. It has pushed forward an impressive development in different experimental techniques and phenomenological knowledge by creating synergies and collaborations among very different researching groups and areas. To this end, many particle candidates have been studied within very different theoretical models, the way these candidates are distributed in the Universe has been investigated, the development of experiments aiming at their detection have been supported, and the combination of an impressive amount of data has been analysed. However, many of these searches involve an important number of open questions related to a huge variety of fields, and many of them have associated important assumptions and uncertainties. In this talk, we would like to call the attention to the indirect detection of dark matter through the analysis of gamma rays. Among other issues, we would like to discuss the differences in the gamma ray spectra simulated by different Monte Carlo event generator packages developed in particle physics. We will show that the intrinsic differences between them are significant and may play an important role in misunderstanding dark matter signals.