Unveiling the high energy Milky Way with the DAMPE space mission

• Andrii Tykhonov (University of Geneva)

Room: Ex-ISEF/Building-Main Lecture Hall The space-based DAMPE experiment (DArk Matter Particle Explorer) has been collecting data since its successful launch in December 2015. It operates smoothly in a Sun-synchronous polar orbit at an altitude of about 500 km. Thanks to its detector configuration (i.e. featuring the deepest calorimeter with the largest acceptance among space-borne instruments) DAMPE is capable of studying galactic cosmic radiation up to energies of about 1 PeV. Its main scientific goals include the indirect search for dark matter signatures in the electron and gamma-ray spectra, precise measurements of cosmic-ray fluxes from tens of GeV up to the PeV region, and high-energy gamma-ray astronomy above a few GeV. This seminar will review the instrument’s characteristics and the adopted data analysis approaches, summarize the main results obtained so far by the mission, compare them with previous measurements, and discuss their implications on our knowledge of the high energy galactic cosmic radiation.