Indirect Dark Matter Searches with the MAGIC Telescopes

MAGIC is a ground-based system of two, 17 m diameter Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescopes located in the Canary island of La Palma. MAGIC-I has been operational since 2004 and it already achieved the lowest energy threshold among the current generation of Cherenkov Telescopes. In 2009 it was joined by MAGIC-II, and together, in the stereoscopic mode, they allow for observations of substantially improved sensitivity, lower energy threshold and better energy and angular resolution. The search for dark matter with MAGIC consists of looking for the signatures of very-high energy gamma-rays that originate from the annihilation of hypothetical dark matter particles. The gamma-ray spectrum resulting from that process should bear distinctive features (like spectral line or cutoff), correlated to the dark matter particle mass, which, according to some models, in the case of weakly interacting massive particles, should be in the very-high energy range and, therefore, detectable by the Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescopes. However, identification of these features, though they are universal, is a challenge, since the potential dark matter signal usually remains invisible under the dominant gamma-radiation from conventional astrophysical sources. For this reason, we direct our search with MAGIC to the objects with large amounts of dark matter, like the Galactic Center, the dwarf spheroidal galaxies and galaxy clusters. Here we report on the indirect dark matter searches performed withMAGIC and discuss how these results can be used to set constrains on dark matter parameter space of certain supersymmetric models.