Licentiate Thesis: Searching for dark matter in the Galactic Center with the IceCube 79-string detector

by Mr Samuel Flis (Stockholms Universitet)

Wednesday 17 Dec 2014, 13:15 → 15:15 Europe/Stockholm

A4:1003

IceCube is a cubic-kilometer neutrino detector situated in the deep glacial ice at the South Pole. The DeepCore low-energy extension of IceCube makes it possible to perform indirect searches for light dark matter particles in our galaxy with masses down to tens of GeV/c2. In the annihilation process of two dark matter particles standard model particles can be created, among them neutrinos. These neutrinos with energies up to the mass of the annihilating dark matter particles would constitute a distinct signal which can be detected at Earth by the IceCube detector. In this licentiate thesis an analysis searching for Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) in the Galactic Center using the 79-string configuration of the IceCube detector is presented. A likelihood analysis incorporating the signal shape and the number of observed events was performed. The data used in the analysis corresponds to 319.7 days of detector exposure. The results of the analysis were consistent with the background only hypothesis and thus upper limits were set on the average product of relative WIMP particle velocity and annihilation cross-section. The IceCube simulation software, which mostly predated the detector, has recently undergone some major changes to address problems that were unforeseen at the time the software was written but also to meet the demands and requirements of future detector extensions such as the Precision IceCube Next Generation Upgrade (PINGU), and the High Energy Extension (HEX). Some of the work involving the upgrade of the IceCube simulation is presented in this thesis with a focus on the detector electronics and logic simulation.