Description
As the Earth travels across the Milky Way, it passes through the galactic halo of dark matter particles. Occasionally a dark matter particle could interact with the contents of the earth, scattering it to a lower energy, which can lead to it becoming gravitationally trapped inside the Earth. If these dark matter particles are self-annihilating, or decay, one possible final state product will be neutrinos, which would lead to a flux of neutrinos at the surface of the earth, coming from dark matter, thus enabling indirect dark matter detection. The work focuses on the specific case of super-heavy dark matter in the mass range 1e7 GeV to 1e11 GeV, and explores the possibility of detecting ultra-high-energy neutrinos in the planned IceCube-Gen2 detector, in the hopes that data in the next 10--15 years can either discover or set new limits on dark matter.
| Field of study | Astrophysics |
|---|---|
| Supervisor | Mauricio Bustamante |
