Search for annihilating dark matter in the Sun with 3 years of IceCube data

By M. Aartsen, M. Ackermann, J. Adams, J. Aguilar, M. Ahlers, M. Ahrens, D. Altmann, K. Andeen, T. Anderson, I. Ansseau and 293 more. 2016

210 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present results from an analysis looking for dark matter annihilation in the Sun with the IceCube neutrino telescope. Gravitationally trapped dark matter in the Sun’s core can annihilate into Standard Model particles making the Sun a source of GeV neutrinos. IceCube is able to detect neutrinos with energies >100 GeV while its low-energy infill array DeepCore extends this to >10 GeV. This analysis uses data gathered in the austral winters between May 2011 and May 2014, corresponding to 532 days of livetime when the Sun, being below the horizon, is a source of up-going neutrino events, easiest to discriminate against the dominant background of atmospheric muons. The sensitivity is a factor of two to four better than previous searches due to additional statistics and improved analysis methods involving better background rejection and reconstructions. The resultant upper limits on the spin-dependent dark matter-proton scattering cross section reach down to $$1.46\times 10^{-5}$$1.46×10-5 pb for a dark matter particle of mass 500 GeV annihilating exclusively into $$\tau ^{+}\tau ^{-}$$τ+τ-particles. These are currently the most stringent limits on the spin-dependent dark matter-proton scattering cross section for WIMP masses above 50 GeV.

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/596aa7067fa166364836802773a5e3062e61240c

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Citations in the corpus

Dark matter direct-detection experiments (2015, background): “ like Ice Cube, ANTARES or SuperKamiokande are able to search for dark matter annihilations into neutrinos. No evidence for such a signal has been observed, resulting in constrains on the crosssection[99][100][101]. Finally, also charged particles like protons, antiprotons, electrons and positrons c”
WIMP dark matter candidates and searches—current status and future prospects (2017, methodology): “rimental progress. In particular, current best limits on DM-nuclei spin-dependent cross section ˙SD p are based on the results obtained by several neutrino detectors, including ANTARES [404], IceCube [405] and Super-Kamiokande [406]. Neutrinos from DM annihilations Depending on a particular DM model”