The figure shows the gamma-ray sky as seen by the Fermi-LAT experiment. Partly, especially outside the galactic plane, gamma-rays might originate from annihilations of dark matter particles.

In 2012, CERN announced the long awaited discovery of a new fundamental particle with properties consistent with those expected for the Standard Model (SM) Higgs boson.

While the Standard Model (SM) Higgs boson has passed all tests at accelerators so far, astrophysical and cosmological observations require without doubt physics beyond the Standard Model.

Dark Matter

In particular, these observations show that about 80% of the matter in  the Universe is in the form of Dark Matter.

Most likely, Dark Matter consists of a new type of elementary particle, with properties that have to be different from any particle contained in the SM. Moreover, physics beyond the SM is required to explain the matter-antimatter asymmetry of the Universe. The detection of  Dark Matter can be tackled in various ways, using the tools of nuclear physics, astrophysics and particle physics.

We concentrate on indirect methods which look for cosmic ray particles such as neutrinos, gamma rays or antiparticles that emerge from Dark Matter annihilations or decays in high-density  regions such as the Sun or the centre of the Galaxy; furthermore, astrophysical probes of cosmological structure formation may help to infer non-trivial properties of the Dark Matter particles.

Comparisons with experimental data from gamma-ray satellites like Fermi (Gamma-ray Space Telescope), charged cosmic ray experiments like Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer Experiment (AMS-02) on the International Space Station and neutrino telescopes like IceCube are used to constrain the interactions and the properties of proposed Dark Matter candidates.