Bi-Weekly IIHE Internal Seminar: Jan Kunnen, "Searching for neutrinos from Dark Matter annihilation in the Earth with the IceCube detector"

Monday 25 Feb 2013, 14:00 → 15:00 Europe/Brussels

Large Seminar Room (IIHE)

Many models predict that heavy celestial bodies capture dark matter, and that these particles will self-annihilate. These annihilations may produce Standard Model particles, including neutrinos. Large scale neutrino telescopes, such as the cubic kilometre IceCube Neutrino Observatory located at the South Pole, can be used to search for such neutrino fluxes. One of the celestial sources of interest is the Earth. Recent calculations indicate that the dark matter annihilation rate in the centre of the Earth, and thus the resulting neutrino flux , could be greater than that initially predicted for low mass (<100 GeV) WIMPs, and within reach of a large neutrino detector. The status of the first search for Earth WIMPs with the IceCube detector will be presented.