Realistic estimation for the detectability of dark matter sub-halos with Fermi-LAT

Understand

Numerical simulations of structure formation have recorded a remarkable progress in the recent years, in particular due to the inclusion of baryonic physics evolving with the dark matter component.

• We generate Monte Carlo realizations of the dark matter sub-halo population based on the results of the recent hydrodynamical simulation suite of Milky Way-sized galaxies.
• We then simulate the gamma-ray sky for both the setup of the 3FGL and 2FHL Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) catalogs, including the contribution from the annihilation of dark matter in the sub-halos.
• We find that the flux sensitivity threshold strongly depends on the particle dark matter mass, and more mildly also on its annihilation channel and the observation latitude.