Prospects for dark matter detection with next generation neutrino telescopes

Abstract

There are strong hints that around a fourth of the energy content of the Universe is made up of dark matter. This type of matter is invisible to us, since it does not interact via the electromagnetic force. One of the leading theories suggests that this type of matter consists of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs), particles with mass around 10-1000 GeV that only interact with baryonic matter via the weak nuclear force and gravitation. If this theory is true, dark matter should be grav- itationally attracted toward the Sun, inside which collisions with baryonic matter have a possibility to slow down the particles to speeds below the escape velocity. As these dark matter particles are captured by the Sun, they will continue to collide with baryonic particles and lose more energy until they settle in the core of the Sun. When the concentration of dark matter particles is sufficiently high in the core, they will self-annihilate with each other, resulting in the creation of Standard Model par- ticles which eventually will decay into neutrinos. These neutrinos will escape the Sun and can possibly be detected in a neutrino telescope. One such telescope is Ice- Cube located at the South Pole, consisting of detectors placed in a cubic kilometer of ice. There is a plan to upgrade this telescope which is called Precision IceCube Next Generation Upgrade (PINGU). In my thesis I have investigated the sensitivity of PINGU to the strength of interactions between dark matter and baryonic matter. The analysis have been performed for the 28 lowest order operators in a non- relativistic effective field theory for a dark matter particle with spin half, annihilating into either b¯b or τ τ¯ which decays into νµ and ν¯µ. I have found that PINGU will improve current IceCube exclusion limits on the coupling constant of the theory for a dark matter mass less than 100 GeV for the b¯b channel and less than 40 GeV for the τ τ¯ channel, after just one year of data taking, for all 28 operators.