Search for dark matter from the center of the Earth with ten years of IceCube data

TL;DR

This study used ten years of IceCube data to search for neutrinos from Earth's center caused by dark matter WIMP annihilation, setting competitive limits on WIMP properties but finding no significant signal.

Contribution

It provides the first decade-long IceCube search for Earth-centered dark matter neutrinos, improving constraints on WIMP properties over previous results.

Findings

No significant dark matter signal detected.

Set world-leading limits on WIMP scattering for masses above 100 GeV.

Most significant result had a 1.06 sigma significance.

Abstract

The nature of dark matter remains unresolved in fundamental physics. Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs), which could explain the nature of dark matter, can be captured by celestial bodies like the Sun or Earth, leading to enhanced self-annihilation into Standard Model particles including neutrinos detectable by neutrino telescopes such as the IceCube Neutrino Observatory. This article presents a search for muon neutrinos from the center of the Earth performed with 10 years of IceCube data using a track-like event selection. We considered a number of WIMP annihilation channels ($\chi\chi\rightarrow\tau^+\tau^-$/$W^+W^-$/$b\bar{b}$) and masses ranging from 10 GeV to 10 TeV. No significant excess over background due to a dark matter signal was found while the most significant result corresponds to the annihilation channel $\chi\chi\rightarrow b\bar{b}$ for the mass $m_{\chi}=250$~GeV with a post-trial significance of $1.06\sigma$. Our results are competitive with previous such searches and direct detection experiments. Our upper limits on the spin-independent WIMP scattering are world-leading among neutrino telescopes for WIMP masses $m_{\chi}>100$~GeV.