Prospects of indirect searches for dark matter annihilations in the earth with ICAL@INO

Abstract

Abstract We study the prospects of detecting muon events at the upcoming Iron CALorimeter (ICAL) detector to be built at the proposed India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO) facility due to neutrinos arising out of annihilation of Weakly Interactive Massive Particles (WIMP) in the centre of the earth. The atmospheric neutrinos coming from the direction of earth core presents an irreducible background. We consider 50kt × 10 years of ICAL running and WIMP masses between 10-100 GeV and present 90% C.L. exclusion sensitivity limits on σ SI which is the WIMP-nucleon Spin Independent (SI) interaction cross-section. The expected sensitivity limits calculated for ICAL for the WIMP annihilation in the earth are more stringent than the limits obtained by any other neutrino detector. For a WIMP mass of 52.14 GeV, where the signal fluxes are enhanced due to resonance capture of WIMP in earth due to Fe nuclei, the sensitivity limits, assuming 100% branching ratio for each channel, are: σ SI = 3.43 × 10−45 cm2 for ν μ $$ {\overline{\nu}}_{\mu } $$ ν ¯ μ channel, σ SI = 1.02 × 10−44 cm2 for τ + τ − channel and σ SI = 5.36 × 10−44 cm2 for $$ b\;\overline{b} $$ b b ¯ channel.