Astroparticle Seminar

The Fermi Large Area Telescope, Astrophysics, Dark Matter Searches and the 130GeV Line

Eric Charles

SLAC

The first four and a half years of Fermi LAT operations have seen numerous exciting scientific results relating to many different topics, some expected and others unexpected. I will present a brief overview of the Fermi mission and the role it plays in current particle astrophysics research. Towards this end I will discuss some recent scientific highlights involving both galactic and extra-galactic sources classes. I will then spend the majority of the talk focusing on searches for signatures of particle dark matter interactions. In particular I will describe the LAT team's search for spectral lines from gamma-ray annihilation or decay, and discuss the status of claims of a line-like feature at 130 GeV near the Galactic center.