One of the main avenues to search for dark matter is to look for astrophysical signatures from the products of annihilating (or decaying) dark matter particles in the Milky Way. Relevant messengers include neutral particles like photons or neutrinos, but also charged antiparticles like positrons or antiprotons that do not travel on straight paths and are instead deflected by Galactic magnetic fields.
The challenge is to identify a typically subdominant signal against an overwhelming, yet often poorly understood, astrophysical background. In this respect, spectral signatures - peculiarities in the energy distribution of the particles resulting from dark matter -- can be a very valuable tool not only to discriminate a dark matter signal against the astrophysical background, but also to gain crucial information about the nature of the dark matter particles themselves (like their masses and spins). These signatures typically only becomes apparent when radiative corrections to the tree-level annihilation rates are taken into account. The goal of this project is to perform such calculations, and to identify new experimental observables depending on the form of the resulting spectra.
The project requires an excellent understanding of quantum field theory, and a very good understanding of dark matter phenomenology. The focus is on an analytical analysis, aided by the algebraic computer package mathematica. Programming skills may be an advantage for the numerical evaluation of the results.