Science of SLAC | The Violent Universe

The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope was built with major contributions from SLAC and launched into space in June 2008. The main instrument is the Large Area Telescope (LAT), which is operated by the LAT Instrument Science Operations Center at SLAC. In this talk, Anna Franckowiak presents the Fermi-LAT instrument and highlights its most interesting results after seven years of operation.

Gamma-ray observations open a new window into the universe, allowing us to study its most exotic and violent processes. They are also an important tool in the search for the dark matter that pervades the universe. One expected signal is gamma rays from annihilations of massive dark matter particles, and the LAT has made by far the most sensitive searches for this process. The high-energy sky seen by the Fermi-LAT is quite dynamic, including explosions of massive stars and their remnants and supermassive black holes in the centers of distant galaxies. The Fermi-LAT also enabled the identification of many cosmic particle accelerators, including supernova remnants and active galactic nuclei, which are far more powerful than the largest particle accelerator on Earth, the Large Hadron Collider in Europe.

Franckowiak obtained her PhD at Humboldt University of Berlin and University of Bonn in Germany in the field of neutrino astronomy as a member of the IceCube collaboration. She joined SLAC as a research associate in 2011 to work on the Fermi-LAT team. At SLAC she has worked on various analysis aspects of the research, including the characterization of the Fermi bubbles and the search for transient gamma-ray signals from novae and supernovae.