Speaker
Vincent Bertin
(Faculte des Sciences de Luminy)
Description
The ANTARES Collaboration is now operating the largest water Cherenkov neutrino
telescope in the Nothern hemisphere. The apparatus, completed in May 2008,
comprises 12 detection lines and a multidisciplinary instrumentation line
installed at a depth of about 2500 m in the Mediterranean Sea offshore from France.
The goals of ANTARES are among others the search for astrophysical neutrino
point sources and for neutrinos produced in self-annihilation of Dark Matter
particles. In that respect, the most promising sources of neutrino emission are
the Sun and the Galactic Centre, where Dark Matter particles from the galactic
halo are expected to accumulate, which should produce a clean signal much less affected
by astrophysical undertainties and/or backgrounds than for indirect detection with gamma rays.
Prior to its completion, ANTARES has been taking data for more than a year in an
intermediate setup with a five and a ten line detector configuration.
First results on the search for Dark Matter annihilations in the Sun with the data
recorded in 2007 and 2008 are presented, as well as sensitivity studies on Dark Matter
searches with the full ANTARES detector and the future large undersea cubic-kilometer
neutrino telescope studied by the KM3NeT consortium. A comparison with respect to predictions on neutrino fluxes from Dark Matter annihilations in the framework of CMSSM and UED models will be presented.
Author
Vincent Bertin
(Faculte des Sciences de Luminy)
