Searches for dark matter in the center of the earth with the IceCube detector

• Main Authors: Ansseau, Isabelle, Lünemann, Jan, Aguilar Sanchez, Juan Antonio
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: 2017
• Subjects: Généralités; South Pole; South pole
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2013/ULB-DIPOT:oai:dipot.ulb.ac.be:2013/270483

Several models predict that dark matter is constituted of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs). Such particles would be attracted by the gravity of massive astronomical objects such as black holes, stars, and the Earth. WIMPs can lose energy through scattering with matter and become trapped in the gravitational field of these objects. They can then annihilate or decay resulting in production of Standard Model particles. The neutrinos thus created will escape, as they pass through ordinary matter almost unaffected. This contribution describes the search for WIMPs accumulated in the center of the Earth using the IceCube neutrino observatory located at the geographic South Pole. Results from the analysis with one year of IceCube data from 2011 will be presented along with the sensitivity for several additional years of data. SCOPUS: cp.p SCOPUS: cp.p info:eu-repo/semantics/published