Astroparticle Seminar: Rameez Mohamed

(NBIA)

Search for annihilating DM in the Sun with IceCube

Dark Matter particles can scatter off nuclei in the Sun, lose energy and be gravitationally captured, where they may pair annihilate into standard model particles, eventually producing neutrinos. Looking for such an excess of GeV neutrinos from the direction of the Sun is the most powerful probe of symmetric DM of GeV-TeV masses with spin dependent DM-nucleon interactions. I will give an overview of such a search using data from 3 years of operation of the completed IceCube-DeepCore array.  While no excess was found, the resultant constraint on the spin dependent DM-nucleon scattering cross section is the most stringent for DM particles heavier than ~50 GeV, and almost an order of magnitude lower w.r.t. previous searches due to more data, better background rejection and a more sophisticated, unbinned analysis method.

We will explore the implications of these constraints on WIMP and WIMP-like models of DM, in complementarity with LHC searches, direct detection experiments and other indirect searches, as well as the future of DM searches in neutrino telescopes.