MAGIC and the Search for Signatures of Supersymmetric Dark Matter

Abstract

The 17m Imaging Air shower Cherenkov Telescope MAGIC (Roque de los Muchachos Observatory, La Palma, Canary Islands) has recently entered its commissioning phase. One of the main goals of the MAGIC telescope project is to provide an unprecedented sensitivity for the detection of gamma rays with energies as low as 30 GeV. A dedicated search for the gamma rays expected to be produced by WIMP annihilations is a prime object of the MAGIC physics program. We consider annihilating supersymmetric dark matter in M 87 and discuss a possible observation strategy. New calculations concerning the extragalactic gamma ray and neutrino backgrounds owing to cosmological neutralino annihilation are also briefly discussed.