Searching UFOs for dark matter with VERITAS

Matthew Lundy ( Université McGill )

Indirect studies of dark matter with Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescopes (IACTs) have traditionally investigated the galactic center and dwarf spheroidal galaxies due to their high dark matter content, but the presence of millisecond pulsars and other gamma-ray source classes cause a degeneracy that makes studies of dark matter challenging. Local overdensities of dark matter are predicted by hierarchical structure formation. A percentage of these are predicted to remain small enough to not attract large amount of baryonic matter. The nearest of these isolated dark matter subhaloes contain unique observational signatures not predicted for other source classes removing the ambiguity present in other searches. Targeting unidentified Fermi-LAT objects (UFOs) we seek to identify the spectral features and special extension predicted for WIMP subhaloes using follow-up VERITAS observations. In this talk we will present the ongoing work on three such sources and discuss the future of this work in the context of the next generation of IACTs.