Indirect Search for Dark Matter with the KM3NeT Neutrino Telescope

AbstraktAbstract

Neutrino telescopes aim to detect dark matter indirectly by observing the neutrinos produced by pair-annihilations or decays of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs). A signal excess of neutrinos resulting from the pair-annihilation of WIMPs can be detected in regions where large amounts of dark matter might accumulate. One possible source is the Sun, where WIMPs are expected to accumulate due to their scatterings in the dense core of the star. The dark matter halo of the Milky Way is another possible close dark matter container. The KM3NeT observatory is composed of two undersea Cherenkov neutrino telescopes (ORCA and ARCA) located in two sites in the Mediterranean Sea, offshore of France and Italy. The two detector configurations are optimised for the detection of neutrinos of different energies, which allows the search for WIMPs in a wide mass range, from the GeV to the TeV scale. In this contribution, searches for WIMP annihilations in the Galactic Centre and the Sun are presented. An unbinned likelihood method is used to discriminate the signal from the background in a 300-day livetime sample of the ARCA detector, and a 543-day sample of the ORCA detector. The limits on the velocity-averaged pair-annihilation cross section of WIMPs are computed for five different primary annihilation channels. For the ORCA analysis, the limits on the spin-dependent and spin-independent scattering cross sections are given for three annihilation channels.

Neutrino telescopes aim to detect dark matter indirectly by observing the neutrinos produced by pair-annihilations or decays of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs). A signal excess of neutrinos resulting from the pair-annihilation of WIMPs can be detected in regions where large amounts of dark matter might accumulate. One possible source is the Sun, where WIMPs are expected to accumulate due to their scatterings in the dense core of the star. The dark matter halo of the Milky Way is another possible close dark matter container. The KM3NeT observatory is composed of two undersea Cherenkov neutrino telescopes (ORCA and ARCA) located in two sites in the Mediterranean Sea, offshore of France and Italy. The two detector configurations are optimised for the detection of neutrinos of different energies, which allows the search for WIMPs in a wide mass range, from the GeV to the TeV scale. In this contribution, searches for WIMP annihilations in the Galactic Centre and the Sun are presented. An unbinned likelihood method is used to discriminate the signal from the background in a 300-day livetime sample of the ARCA detector, and a 543-day sample of the ORCA detector. The limits on the velocity-averaged pair-annihilation cross section of WIMPs are computed for five different primary annihilation channels. For the ORCA analysis, the limits on the spin-dependent and spin-independent scattering cross sections are given for three annihilation channels.