Hunting dark matter with MeerKAT

The nature of dark matter remains a gap within our current cosmological paradigm, but MeerKAT may hold the key to helping us reveal this occult substance. Historically radio-frequency indirect dark matter detection has been avoided due to the complication of characterizing magnetic field environments. With the advanced capabilities of the new generation of interferometers, radio detection may prove to be a robust way to examine the alleged signals of dark matter annihilation. The potential of MeerKAT, currently the world's best interferometer, as a dark matter search engine has been only minimally investigated. Galaxy clusters prove to be robust labs for radio dark matter detection, as they are known to host large-scale diffuse emission, are dark matter dominated, and contain large-scale magnetic fields. MeerKAT Galaxy Cluster Legacy Survey (MGCLS) provides an abundance of target environments. We use the wealth of data available to investigate dark matter emission in a sample of clusters. Through an integrated flux comparison of predicted signals to those observed, we have produced competitive upper limits on the annihilation cross-section, where under the assumption of a thermal relic population weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) have been excluded for masses less than 800 GeV in the galaxy cluster Abell 4038. It is expected that targets in which no halo-like diffuse emission is observed may further improve on these results, by limiting the maximum allowed signal from dark matter to the faintest emission observable by MeerKAT. I will present the results of our investigation on a set of massive clusters where no diffuse emission has been detected.