Dark matter searches toward the Galactic Centre halo with H.E.S.S

Abstract

The presence of dark matter in the Universe is nowadays widely supported by a large body of astronomical and cosmological observations. The central region of the Milky Way is expected to harbor a large amount of dark matter. Very-high-energy (>100 GeV) gamma-ray observations with the H.E.S.S. array of Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescopes are powerful probes to look for self-annihilations of dark matter particles toward the Galactic Centre. A new search for a dark matter signal has been carried out on the full H.E.S.S.-I dataset of 2004-2014 observations with a 2D-binned likelihood method using spectral and spatial properties of signal and background. Updated constraints are derived on the velocity-weighted annihilation cross section. Higher statistics from the 10-year Galactic Center dataset of H.E.S.S. I together with a novel analysis technique allow to significantly improve the sensitivity. New results are presented.