A blueprint for detecting supersymmetric dark matter in the Galactic halo

Understand

Dark matter is the dominant form of matter in the universe, but its nature is unknown.

• It is plausibly an elementary particle, perhaps the lightest supersymmetric partner of known particle species.
• In this case, annihilation of dark matter in the halo of the Milky Way should produce gamma-rays at a level which may soon be observable.
• Previous work has argued that the annihilation signal will be dominated by emission from very small clumps (perhaps smaller even than the Earth) which would be most easily detected where they cluster together in the dark matter halos of dwarf satellite galaxies.