About
Have you heard of the MeV Gap in astronomy? It's an energy range where our capability to detect photons is greatly limited due to high backgrounds and a low photon interaction cross-section dominated by Compton scattering. However, while technologically challenging, many sources can be studied in this energy range—potentially including dark matter. The Compton Spectrometer and Imager (COSI) will bridge this gap, opening a new window into MeV astronomy. Launching in 2027 as a NASA Small Explorer (SMEX) mission, COSI will observe the entire sky from 0.2 to 5 MeV. Compared with previous MeV telescopes, COSI is set apart by its large instantaneous field of view (>25% of the sky), daily all-sky coverage, and excellent energy resolution (∼1% at 1 MeV). Here, we present an overview of the COSI mission and the instrument characteristics that make COSI well-suited to search for diffuse monochromatic lines, like those potentially created by the decay of notable MeV dark matter candidates, including axion-like particles and sterile neutrinos.
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The talk
Credits and licence
- Institution
- CERN
- Speaker
- Robin Anthony-Petersen
- Year
- 2026
- Language
- English
- Source
- CERN
- Licence
- CERN, as CERN states it. CERN's terms
- Attribution
- © CERN. CERN provides its audiovisual media free of charge for educational and informational use, credited to CERN; this lecture is shown in CERN's own player.
- Who can watch
- CERN gives no rating. Invisible Network shows it to Teens profiles and older, judged from what the source says about it. How courses are placed