2014/06/30 by IceCube Collaboration, M. G. Aartsen, M. Ackermann +310 · 43 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Annihilation #Astrophysics #Astrophysics and Cosmic Phenomena #Cherenkov radiation #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #Dark matter #Dark matter halo #Detector #Galactic halo #Galaxy #Halo #Multipole expansion #Muon #Neutrino #Neutrino Physics Research #Particle physics #Physics #astro-ph.GA #astro-ph.HE
paper · pdf · doi:10.1140/epjc/s10052-014-3224-5
published in The European Physical Journal C 75(1) (Springer Science+Business Media) · 17 pages, 18 figures, 5 tables
arxiv created 2014/10/22 · openalex publication_date 2015/01/01 · arxiv updated 2015/02/05 · openalex created_date 2019/06/27 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/04
Dark matter which is bound in the Galactic halo might self-annihilate and produce a flux of stable final state particles, e.g. high energy neutrinos. These neutrinos can be detected with IceCube, a cubic-kilometer sized Cherenkov detector. Given IceCube’s large field of view, a characteristic anisotropy of the additional neutrino flux is expected. In this paper we describe a multipole method to search for such a large-scale anisotropy in IceCube data. This method uses the expansion coefficients of a multipole expansion of neutrino arrival directions and incorporates signal-specific weights for each expansion coefficient. We apply the technique to a high-purity muon neutrino sample from the Northern Hemisphere. The final result is compatible with the null-hypothesis. As no signal was observed, we present limits on the self-annihilation cross-section averaged over the relative velocity distribution ⟨ σ _\mathrm A v⟩ down to 1.9× 10-23 \text cm3 \text s-1 for a dark matter particle mass of 700–1,000 GeV and direct annihilation into ν ν . The resulting exclusion limits come close to exclusion limits from γ -ray experiments, that focus on the outer Galactic halo, for high dark matter masses of a few TeV and hard annihilation channels.