All-flavour search for neutrinos from dark matter annihilations in the Milky Way with IceCube/DeepCore

• Main Authors: Arguelles Delgado, Carlos A (Contributor), Axani, Spencer Nicholas (Contributor), Collins, G. H. (Contributor), Conrad, Janet Marie (Contributor), Jones, Benjamin James Poyner (Contributor), Moulai, Marjon H. (Contributor)
• Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics (Contributor), Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Laboratory for Nuclear Science (Contributor)
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Springer-Verlag, 2017-06-01T13:49:10Z.
• Subjects: Article
• Online Access: Get fulltext

 We present the first IceCube search for a signal of dark matter annihilations in the Milky Way using all-flavour neutrino-induced particle cascades. The analysis focuses on the DeepCore sub-detector of IceCube, and uses the surrounding IceCube strings as a veto region in order to select starting events in the DeepCore volume. We use 329 live-days of data from IceCube operating in its 86-string configuration during 2011-2012. No neutrino excess is found, the final result being compatible with the background-only hypothesis. From this null result, we derive upper limits on the velocity-averaged self-annihilation cross-section, ⟨σAv⟩ , for dark matter candidate masses ranging from 30 GeV up to 10 TeV, assuming both a cuspy and a flat-cored dark matter halo profile. For dark matter masses between 200 GeV and 10 TeV, the results improve on all previous IceCube results on ⟨σAv⟩ , reaching a level of 10 -23 cm 3 s -1 , depending on the annihilation channel assumed, for a cusped NFW profile. The analysis demonstrates that all-flavour searches are competitive with muon channel searches despite the intrinsically worse angular resolution of cascades compared to muon tracks in IceCube.