Analysis Methods for Milky Way Dark Matter Halo Detection

摘要

We present methods for the analysis of dark matter annihilation in the smooth halo of the Milky Way galaxy. We model the diffuse gamma-ray background using GALPROP, and model the halo using an NFW prole and the gamma-ray spectrum for WIMP pair annihilation. We plan to combine these models with the point source catalog and a simple model for the extragalactic gamma ray background. Using the downhill simplex method to converge on the maximum likelihood value, we can vary key parameters in these models and fit them to the gamma-ray data. Through the use of the Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method we can then map out the likelihood as a function of the model parameters to estimate the correlated errors on these parameters.