Joint Astrophysics Colloquium

Studies on Cosmic Ray Acceleration and Dark Matter Signals with Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope

Tuneyoshi (Tune) Kamae

Stanford University/SLAC

Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope (FGST) has been surveying all sky since August 2008 with its main instrument the Large Area Telescope (LAT). In the first 11 months of data, we found ~1450 sources with 4 sigma or higher significance. The most populous Galactic and extra-Galactic sources are gamma-ray pulsars and jet-emitting active galactic nuclei (Blazars) respectively. This talk will focus on two key topics of the LAT: cosmic ray acceleration in our Galaxy and search for dark matter signals. We are closing on gamma-ray emission mechanisms in the rotating neutron pulsars and supernova remnants. On the dark matter front, consistency between our gamma-ray observations and the positron and anti-proton fluxes has been studied. If time allows I will briefly report on the hard X-ray polarization instrument, PoGOLite.