First searches for Dark Matter
20 November 2024 – In a new paper with the title ‘First searches for Dark Matter with the KM3NeT Neutrino Telescopes’ we present limits for neutrino production by Dark Matter annihilation in the Sun and the Galactic Centre. For the analysis we used the data of early configurations of the ARCA and ORCA detectors of KM3NeT.
We tested for different dark matter masses, spanning from a few GeV/c^2 up to 100 TeV/c^2, but did not find a dark matter signal in the data of ARCA from the direction of the Galactic Centre. Instead, we set a limit on the self-annihilation cross section of dark matter into five different Standard Model particles, for the different dark matter masses tested.
In the data of ORCA we did not find a dark matter signal from the Sun. In this case, we could set a limit on the cross section of the scattering process between dark matter and nucleons.
The paper is submitted to JCAP. A pre-print is stored at the arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.10092
In the image:
90% CF upper limits on the thermally-averaged Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs, candidate Dark Matter particles) annihilation cross section as a function of the WIMP mass for the τ+τ– annihilation channel. The limit was obtained using data sets from the ARCA8, ARCA19 and ARCA21 configurations. For comparison, results obtained by other experiments are also shown.
