Abstract:

The nature of dark matter is one of the great mysteries of physics. Both direct and astrophysical searches for weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP) dark matter have yielded tantalizing results in recent years, including hints of a gamma-ray line in the inner Milky Way at 135 GeV in Fermi LAT data. There is no process in Standard Model physics that can produce such a line, but some WIMP models could. If the line is confirmed by additional data, it would have a far-reaching impact on particle physics and cosmology. I will summarize the current state of the observations of the Galactic center, clusters, and unassociated halo objects, and speculate about models of particle dark mattr that could explain the data.