Dark Matter Annihilation in the Galactic Center

The Weakly Interacting Massive Particle model considers the hypothetical dark matter (DM) particle to be its own antiparticle, and thus we can expect annihilation in high density regions, such as the Galactic Center (GC). Working under these assumptions, the gamma ray emission from annihilation events can be modelled with spectral and spatial components. We use simulated data from the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) for a first look analysis that can be performed within a year of data collection using a spatial analysis method with gammapy, a python package for CTA data currently in development. Collapsing the data over the spectral dimension into one energy bin allows us to increase the event count with fewer observations. Using this stacked counts image, we performed iterative fitting and source subtraction to generate a residual image representing the diffuse gamma ray emission in the GC. We show that this type of analysis is highly dependent on the choice of background model since the region has many overlapping sources, and that the best estimator is an adaptive ring background algorithm. We were not able to recover the spatial signal from DM annihilation using just the first year of data, but a similar analysis with a greater number of observations, a more rigorous method of source subtraction, or a more refined background model may recover a statistically significant signal.