Ponente
Descripción
The existence of dark matter (DM) has been well-established by repeated observations probing many length scales. Although DM is expected to comprise the majority of the current matter content of the Universe, its nature remains unknown. Weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) are a class of DM that arise naturally from Standard Model (SM) extensions. Generically WIMPs have a non-zero cross-section with SM nuclei, which allows them to scatter off nuclei in large celestial bodies such as the Sun, losing energy and becoming gravitationally bound in the process. After repeated scatterings, WIMPs will eventually sink to the solar center, leading to an excess of WIMPs there. For sufficiently high densities, WIMPS will annihilate to stable SM particles, either directly or through a decay chain of unstable SM particles. Among stable SM particles, only neutrinos can escape the dense solar core. Thus, one may look for an excess of neutrinos from the direction of the Sun as evidence of WIMPs. The IceCube Neutrino Observatory, which detects Cherenkov radiation of charged particles produced in neutrino interactions, is especially well-suited to such searches since it is sensitive to WIMPs with mass in the preferred region for super symmetric extensions of the SM. In this contribution, I will present the status of IceCube's most recent solar WIMP search, which covers the WIMP mass range from 10 GeV to 1 TeV.
| Affiliation | University of Wisconsin-Madison |
|---|
