Search for dark matter towards the Galactic Centre with 11 years of ANTARES data
A. Albert (Université de Haute Alsace, Mulhouse, France, Université de Strasbourg, CNRS, IPHC UMR 7178, Strasbourg, France); M. André (Technical University of Catalonia, Laboratory of Applied Bioacoustics, Barcelona, Spain); M. Anghinolfi (INFN - Sezione di Genova, Genova, Italy); G. Anton (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Erlangen Centre for Astroparticle Physics, Erlangen, Germany); M. Ardid (Institut d'Investigació per a la Gestió Integrada de les Zones Costaneres (IGIC), Universitat Politècnica de València, Gandia, Spain); et al - Show all 143 authors
Neutrino detectors participate in the indirect search for the fundamental constituents of dark matter (DM) in form of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs). In WIMP scenarios, candidate DM particles can pair-annihilate into Standard Model products, yielding considerable fluxes of high-energy neutrinos. A detector like ANTARES, located in the Northern Hemisphere, is able to perform a complementary search looking towards the Galactic Centre, where a high density of dark matter is thought to accumulate. Both this directional information and the spectral features of annihilating DM pairs are entered into an unbinned likelihood method to scan the data set in search for DM-like signals in ANTARES data. Results obtained upon unblinding 3170 days of data reconstructed with updated methods are presented, which provides a larger, and more accurate, data set than a previously published result using 2101 days. A non-observation of dark matter is converted into limits on the velocity-averaged cross section for WIMP pair annihilation.
