Search for Dark Matter Annihilations in the Sun with the 79-String IceCube Detector

• Published in: Physical Review Letters
• Main Authors: Aartsen, M. G., Besson, David Zeke, IceCube Collaboration
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: American Physical Society 2014
• Subjects: Austral; Canada; Silverwood; National Science Foundation Office of Polar Programs; Swedish Polar Research Secretariat
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1808/15838; https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.110.131302

We have performed a search for muon neutrinos from dark matter annihilation in the center of the Sun with the 79-string configuration of the IceCube neutrino telescope. For the first time, the DeepCore subarray is included in the analysis, lowering the energy threshold and extending the search to the austral summer. The 317 days of data collected between June 2010 and May 2011 are consistent with the expected background from atmospheric muons and neutrinos. Upper limits are set on the dark matter annihilation rate, with conversions to limits on spin-dependent and spin-independent scattering cross sections of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) on protons, for WIMP masses in the range 20–5000 GeV/c2. These are the most stringent spin-dependent WIMP-proton cross section limits to date above 35 GeV/c2 for most WIMP models. We thank H. Silverwood for his support on SUSY model scans. We acknowledge the support from the following agencies: U.S. National Science Foundation-Office of Polar Programs, U.S. National Science Foundation-Physics Division, University of Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, the Grid Laboratory Of Wisconsin (GLOW) grid infrastructure at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Open Science Grid (OSG) grid infrastructure, U.S. Department of Energy, National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, and the Louisiana Optical Network Initiative (LONI) grid computing resources; National Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada; Swedish Research Council, Swedish Polar Research Secretariat, Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing (SNIC), and Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, Sweden; German Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF), Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), Helmholtz Alliance for Astroparticle Physics (HAP), and Research Department of Plasmas with Complex Interactions (Bochum), Germany; Fund for Scientific Research (FNRS-FWO), FWO Odysseus programme, Flanders Institute to encourage scientific and technological research in industry (IWT), and Belgian ...