Complementarity of direct and indirect dark matter detection experiments

Abstract

We investigate the prospects for reconstructing the mass, spin-independent and spin-dependent cross sections of dark matter particles with a combination of future direct detection experiments such as XENON1T, and the IceCube neutrino telescope in the 86-string configuration including the DeepCore array. We quantify the degree of complementarity between the two experiments by adopting realistic values for their exposure, energy threshold and resolution. Starting from benchmark models arising from a supersymmetric model with 25 free parameters, we show that despite the stringent constraints set by the run with 79 strings, IceCube can help break the degeneracies in the dark matter cross section parameter space, even in the unfortunate case where it fails to discover high energy neutrinos from the Sun. We also discuss how the reconstruction of the dark matter particle parameters from the combined data sets is affected by the uncertainties associated with the nuclear structure of the target material in case of spin-dependent scattering and those associated with astrophysical quantities such as the dark matter density and velocity distribution.