A Search for Dark Matter Radio Signatures in the Coma and Abell 2199 Galaxy Clusters

Dark Matter (DM) composes approximately 85% of the matter content of the Universe; however, its particle nature remains unknown. Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) are among the most studied DM candidates and may produce observable synchrotron emission through annihilation into secondary electrons and positrons in the presence of magnetic fields. The aim of this thesis is to investigate the potential of radio observations to constrain WIMP properties using galaxy clusters as targets. The study focuses on the Coma and Abell 2199 clusters, which contain massive dark matter halos and host large-scale magnetic fields, making them promising targets for DM-induced synchrotron searches. A major challenge of indirect DM searches at radio frequencies is the separation a potential DM signal from radio emission produced by astrophysical processes. The expected DM emission was modeled using the DarkMatters code for different WIMP masses in bb annihilation channel. For the Coma cluster, we used the radio data from Bonafede et al. (2022). We exclude WIMPs with masses below approximately 1 TeV at the 95% confidence level, assuming the thermal annihilation cross section. This result is consistent with recent γ-ray and radio constraints. For Abell 2199, LOFAR observations at 144 MHz were processed using a standard radio-interferometric pipeline. However, artifacts from the central radio source 3C 338 prevented a reliable extraction of diffuse emission. Upper limits derived from the residual flux and RMS noise indicate that this method could constrain WIMP masses up to ∼100 GeV for the thermal annihilation cross section. These results highlight the potential of low-frequency radio observations and future facilities such as the Square Kilometre Array for indirect DM searches.