Searching for dark matter with neutrino telescopes

Abstract

One of the most interesting mysteries of astrophysics is the puzzle of dark matter. Although numerous techniques have been explored and developed to detect this elusive substance, its nature remains unknown. One such method uses large high-energy neutrino telescopes to look for the annihilation products of dark matter annihilations. In this paper, we briefly review this technique. We describe the calculations used to find the rate of capture of WIMPs in the Sun or Earth and the spectrum of neutrinos produced in the resulting dark matter annihilations. We will discuss these calculations within the context of supersymmetry and models with universal extra dimensions, the lightest supersymmetric particle and lightest Kaluza–Klein particle providing the WIMP candidate in these cases, respectively. We will also discuss the status of some of the experiments relevant to these searches: AMANDA, IceCube and ANTARES.