INDIRECT SEARCH FOR DARK MATTER WITH THE ANTARES NEUTRINO TELESCOPE

Abstract

ANTARES (Astronomy with a Neutrino Telescope and Abyss environmental RESearch) is currently the largest neutrino detector on the Northern Hemisphere. The detector consists of twelve lines, carrying 885 ten-inch photomultipliers in total, placed at a depth of about 2480 meters in the Mediterranean Sea near Toulon, France. The PMTs detect Cherenkov light emitted by muons from neutrino charged current interactions in the surrounding seawater and the rock below. The neutrinos momentum is transferred to the muons allowing for reconstruction of the neutrinos direction. The goals of ANTARES are among others the search for astrophysical neutrino point sources and for neutrinos produced in self-annihilation of dark matter particles. A likely source of the latter type of neutrino emission would be the Sun, where dark matter particles from the galactic halo are expected to accumulate. ANTARES is taking data with its full twelve line configuration since May 2008, and has been before in a five and ten line setup for more than a year. First results on the search for dark matter annihilation in the Sun, and their interpretation in the framework of mSugra are presented, as well as sensitivity studies on Dark Matter search with the full ANTARES detector and the future large undersea KM3NeT neutrino telescope.