Speaker
Description
Dark matter accumulates inside Earth as the planet plows through the dark matter halo in the Milky Way. Possible annihilation of dark matter to Standard Model particles can be probed in indirect dark matter searches. Among the messengers, neutrinos are uniquely ideal as they can escape dense regions. Neutrino telescopes offer opportunities to search for dark matter signals from the Earth. Such studies have been restricted to dark matter masses below PeV as the Earth becomes opaque to very-high-energy neutrinos. However, the tau regeneration effect enables very-high-energy tau neutrinos to traverse the Earth and regenerate at lower energies, resulting in a detectable signal. In this talk, I will discuss utilizing neutrino telescopes operating at TeV-PeV energies to probe very heavy dark matter and present upper limits on the spin-independent dark matter–nucleon cross section derived from IceCube public data.
