"Investigating Dark Matter with the Fermi Large Area Telescope" by Simona Murgia

The Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) has been successfully launched  from Cape Canaveral on 11 June 2008. It is exploring the gamma ray sky in the energy range from 20 MeV to over 300 GeV with unprecedeted sensitivity. One of the most exciting science questions that Fermi LAT will address is the nature of dark matter. Several theoretical models have been proposed that predict the existence of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) that are excellent dark matter candidates. Fermi LAT investigates the existence of WIMPs indirectly, primarily through their annihilation or decay into photons and into electrons and positrons. I will present recent results on these searches.