A Search for Solar Neutralino Dark Matter with the AMANDA-II Neutrino Telescope

• Main Author: Burgess, Thomas
• Format: Doctoral or Postdoctoral Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: Stockholms universitet, Fysikum 2008
• Subjects: Dark matter; AMANDA; Supersymmetry; WIMP; Neutralino; Neutrino; IceCube; Astroparticle physics; Astropartikelfysik; Antarctic; South Pole; The Antarctic; Antarc*; Ice Sheet; South pole
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-7378

A relic density of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) remaining from the Big Bang constitutes a promising solution to the Dark Matter problem. It is possible for such WIMPs to be trapped by and accumulate in gravitational potentials of massive dense objects such as the Sun. A perfect WIMP candidate appears in certain supersymmetric extensions to the Standard Model of particle physics, where the lightest supersymmetric particle is a neutralino which can be stable, massive and weakly interacting. The neutralinos may annihilate pair-wise and in these interactions neutrinos with energies ranging up to the neutralino mass can be indirectly produced. Hence, a possible population of dark matter neutralinos trapped in the Sun can give rise to an observable neutrino flux. The Antarctic Muon And Neutrino Detector Array, AMANDA, is a neutrino telescope that detects Cherenkov light emitted by charged particles created in neutrino interactions in the South Pole glacial ice sheet using an array of light detectors frozen into the deep ice. In this work data taken with the AMANDA-II detector during 2003 are analyzed to measure or put upper bounds on the flux of such neutrinos from the Sun. In the analysis detailed signal and background simulations are compared to measurements. Background rejection filters optimized for various neutralino models have been constructed. No excess above the background expected from neutrinos and muons created in cosmic ray interactions in the atmosphere was found. Instead 90% confidence upper limits have been set on the neutralino annihilation rate in the Sun and the muon flux induced by neutralino signal neutrinos.