Towards detecting super-GeV dark matter via annihilation to neutrinos

• Main Author: Arina, Chiara
• Other Authors: UCL - SST/IRMP - Institut de recherche en mathématique et physique
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Institute of Physics Publishing Ltd. 2022
• Subjects: dark matter; neutrino telescopes; Orca
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/271079

The next generation of neutrino telescopes will feature unprecedented sensitivities in the detection of neutrinos. Here we study the capabilities of a large-scale neutrino telescope, like the fully-operating KM3NeT experiment in the near future, for detecting dark matter annihilation signals from the Galactic Centre. We consider both ORCA and ARCA detectors, covering dark matter masses from a few GeV to 100 TeV. We obtain the sensitivities with a maximum-likelihood analysis method and present them as upper limits in the thermally averaged annihilation cross-section into Standard Model fermions. Our projections show that the sensitivity of such a neutrino telescope can reach the thermal relic line for mχ & 1 TeV and for mχ ' few GeV, for the NFW dark matter density profile. This demonstrates that ORCA- and ARCA-like detectors will be able to perform competitive dark matter searches in a wide range of masses. The implications of these striking projections are investigated in a few selected dark matter particle models, where we show that neutrino telescopes are able to probe new parameter space.