Fermi-LAT Sensitivity to Dark Matter Annihilation in Via Lactea II Substructure

Abstract

We present a study of the ability of the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope to detect dark-matter annihilation signals from the Galactic subhalos predicted by the Via Lactea II N-body simulation. We implement an improved formalism for estimating the boost factor needed to account for the effect of dark-matter clumping on scales below the resolution of the simulation, and we incorporate a detailed Monte Carlo simulation of the response of the Fermi-LAT telescope, including a simulation of its all-sky observing mode integrated over a ten year mission. We find that for WIMP masses up to about 150 GeV in standard supersymmetric models with velocity-averaged cross section 3*10^-26 cm^3 s^-1, a few subhalos could be detectable with >5 standard deviations significance and would likely deviate significantly from the appearance of a point source.