Speaker
Description
The flux of high-energy gamma rays provides crucial information for constraining the properties of particle dark matter candidates, such as Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) or Axion-Like Particles (ALPs). Slowly but steadily entering the construction phase at its sites in both the northern and southern hemispheres, the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) is set out to explore the sky in the 20 GeV - 300 TeV energy range. With improved energy and angular resolutions, as well as a significantly larger effective area compared to the current generation of Cherenkov telescopes, the CTA is expected to venture into unexplored terrain in the parameter space of WIMPs, ALPs, and other particle dark matter models. The CTA will enable us to search for dark matter signatures across the entire gamma-ray sky, including targets such as the Milky Way's Galactic centre, dwarf spheroidal galaxies, the Large Magellanic Cloud, and extragalactic objects. In this talk, I provide an overview of the CTA's capabilities as a dark matter discovery instrument, focusing on prospects for the search for TeV-scale WIMP dark matter and ALPs.