Speaker
Description
Dark matter constitutes approximately 27% of the total energy content of the Universe, making its nature one of the most important open questions in modern physics. Among the proposed dark matter candidates are Axion-Like Particles (ALPs), hypothetical particles that can couple to photons and undergo photon–ALP oscillations in the presence of magnetic fields over astrophysical distances. Launched in 2008, the Fermi Space Telescope has continuously observed the gamma-ray sky for more than 17 years in the energy range from 0.1 GeV to hundreds of GeV. Its publicly available dataset provides an unprecedented opportunity to search for signatures of new physics in astrophysical sources.
One of the brightest quasars observed by Fermi-LAT is 3C 273, located at a redshift of z=0.158 and characterized by a relativistic jet oriented at an angle of approximately 2° — 8° with respect to the line of sight. These properties — namely its cosmological distance and jet orientation toward Earth — make 3C 273 a promising target for searches of photon–ALP oscillation signatures. In this work, we present progress toward constraining the ALP parameter space using gamma-ray observations of this source. This work was supported by UNAM-PAPIIT IG100726.