UCLA

It is unknown what constitutes dark matter.The properties of dark matter particles may be observed indirectly if dark matter annihilates or decays into Standard Model particles that are then detected. Work is presented on two such experiments, performed with GAPS and VERITAS. GAPS is a forthcoming balloon-borne cosmic-ray antimatter detector whose unprecedented sensitivity to the fluxes of antiprotons, antideuterons, and antihelium makes possible the detection of a variety of exotic sources of these particles. We outline development of the GAPS TOF system, and demonstrate its ability to achieve desired resolutions in time, position, and energy. VERITAS is an imaging atmospheric Cherenkov telescope array that has been observing gamma rays from the Galactic Center region for over 10 years. We develop a template-based background estimation method to look for excess gamma rays in the Galactic Center halo. No significant excess is found, and limits on the thermally-averaged annihilation cross section are derived with dependence on the annihilation channel, reaching $\langle \sigma_\text{ann} v\rangle < 1.38\times 10^{-25}\text{ cm}^3\text{ s}^{-1}$ for a 6 TeV dark matter particle that annihilates into $\tau^+\tau^-$.