Document Type
Article
Language
eng
Publication Date
3-2017
Publisher
Springer
Source Publication
The European Physical Journal C
Source ISSN
1434-6044
Abstract
We present results from an analysis looking for darkmatter 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>100GeVwhile its low-energy infill array DeepCore extends this to >10GeV. 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 1.46×10−5 pb for a dark matter particle of mass 500GeV annihilating exclusively into τ+ τ− particles. These are currently the most stringent limits on the spin-dependent dark matter-proton scattering cross section for WIMP masses above 50GeV.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Andeen, Karen, "Search for Annihilating Dark Matter in the Sun with 3 Years of Icecube Data" (2017). Physics Faculty Research and Publications. 157.
https://epublications.marquette.edu/physics_fac/157
Comments
Published version. The European Physical Journal C, Vol. 77, No. 146 (March 2017). DOI. © 2017 The Author(s). This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
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