Speaker
Description
While astrophysical observations imply that 85% of the matter content is unaccounted for, the nature of this dark matter (DM) content remains unknown. Weakly interacting massive particles—DM particles that interact at or below the weak interaction scale—could naturally explain this unknown matter component. These interactions with the SM allow them to be gravitationally captured in celestial bodies like the Sun. Trapped DM in the core of the sun could then annihilate each other, producing stable Standard Model (SM) particles, of which only neutrinos would be capable of escaping the Sun’s dense interior. Thus, an excess of neutrinos from the direction of the Sun would serve as evidence of DM. The IceCube Upgrade is a dense infill of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory that will lower the energy threshold and improve sensitivity from 1 to 500 GeV, thus enhancing IceCube’s sensitivity to GeV-scale DM.
In this contribution, I present projections of IceCube Upgrade’s sensitivity to the DM-proton scattering cross section for DM with masses between 3 GeV and 500 GeV. These sensitivities will establish IceCube as the most sensitive DM indirect detection experiment for DM with masses between 3 GeV and 10 TeV.
| Collaboration(s) | IceCube |
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