Annihilation Lines from Dark Matter with the Fermi-LAT

Dark matter is today one of the most intriguing but so far unresolved issues in physics. Many extensions of the Standard Model of particle physics predict a stable Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP) that may annihilate directly into two gamma-rays. If the WIMPs are non-relativistic, the gamma-rays from this channel will have an energy equal to the mass of the WIMP. The signature caused by this annihilation is a spectral line, smeared out only by the energy resolution of the detector. The signal would be a ''smoking gun'' for dark matter, since no other astrophysical source should be able to produce it. We present here the preliminary results from the search for a dark matter line on a limited data set from the Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT), the main instrument onboard the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, which was successfully launched on June 11, 2008. The Fermi-LAT is a pair-conversion detector for gamma-rays with an energy range from 20 MeV to 300 GeV and has an unprecedented resolution and sensitivity.