Searching For Dark Matter with Neutrino Telescopes

Abstract

One of the most interesting mysteries of astrophysics is the puzzle of dark matter. Although numerous techniques have been explored and developed to detect this elusive substance, its nature remains unknown. One such method uses large high-energy neutrino telescopes to look for the annihilation products of dark matter annihilations. In this summary article, we briefly review this technique. We describe the calculations used to find the rate of capture of WIMPs in the Sun or Earth and the spectrum of neutrinos produced in the resulting dark matter annihilations. We will discuss these calculations within the context of supersymmetry and models with universal extra dimensions, the lightest supersymmetric particle and lightest Kaluza-Klein particle providing the WIMP candidate in these cases, respectively. We will also discuss the status of some of the experiments relevant to these searches: AMANDA, IceCube and ANTARES.

For "Focus on Neutrino Physics" issue of New Journal of Physics

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• Supersymmetric Dark Matter
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Cited by in corpus (15)

• Baryon Number in Warped GUTs : Model Building and (Dark Matter Related) Phenomenology
• TeV gamma-rays and the largest masses and annihilation cross sections of neutralino dark matter
• Have Atmospheric Cerenkov Telescopes Observed Dark Matter?
• Cascade Events at IceCube+DeepCore as a Definitive Constraint on the Dark Matter Interpretation of the PAMELA and Fermi Anomalies
• Muon Fluxes From Dark Matter Annihilation
• Complementarity of direct and indirect Dark Matter detection experiments
• On the nature of dark matter
• SZ effect from Dark Matter annihilation
• Muon Flux Limits for Majorana Dark Matter Particles
• Cosmogenic neutrinos and quasi-stable supersymmetric particle production
• On the scattering of a high-energy cosmic ray electrons off the dark matter
• Dark matter from unification
• High Energy Neutrinos as a Probe for New Physics and Astrophysics
• Searching for Neutrinos from WIMP Annihilations in the Galactic Stellar Disk
• Constraints on Majorana Dark Matter from a Fourth Lepton Family