Constraining Galactic dark matter with gamma-ray pixel counts statistics

Understand

Gamma-ray searches for new physics such as dark matter are often driven by investigating the composition of the extragalactic gamma-ray background (EGB).

• Classic approaches to EGB decomposition manifest in resolving individual point sources and dissecting the intensity spectrum of the remaining unresolved component.
• Furthermore, statistical methods have recently been proven to outperform the sensitivity of classic source detection algorithms in finding point-source populations in the unresolved flux regime.
• In this article, we employ the 1-point photon count statistics of eight years of Fermi-LAT data to resolve the population of extragalactic point sources and to decompose the diffuse isotropic background contribution for Galactic latitudes |b|>30 deg.