Eur. Phys. J. C (2015) 75: 20
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-014-3224-5

Regular Article - Experimental Physics

Multipole analysis of IceCube data to search for dark matter accumulated in the Galactic halo

IceCube Collaboration

¹ III. Physikalisches Institut, RWTH Aachen University, 52056, Aachen, Germany
² School of Chemistry and Physics, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA, 5005, Australia
³ Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Alaska Anchorage, 3211 Providence Dr., Anchorage, AK, 99508, USA
⁴ CTSPS, Clark-Atlanta University, Atlanta, GA, 30314, USA
⁵ School of Physics and Center for Relativistic Astrophysics, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, 30332, USA
⁶ Department of Physics, Southern University, Baton Rouge, LA, 70813, USA
⁷ Department of Physics, University of California, Berkeley, CA, 94720, USA
⁸ Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, 94720, USA
⁹ Institut für Physik, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, 12489, Berlin, Germany
¹⁰ Fakultät für Physik und Astronomie, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, 44780, Bochum, Germany
¹¹ Physikalisches Institut, Universität Bonn, Nussallee 12, 53115, Bonn, Germany
¹² Université Libre de Bruxelles, Science Faculty CP230, 1050, Brussels, Belgium
¹³ Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Dienst ELEM, 1050, Brussels, Belgium
¹⁴ Department of Physics, Chiba University, Chiba, 263-8522, Japan
¹⁵ Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Canterbury, Private Bag, 4800, Christchurch, New Zealand
¹⁶ Department of Physics, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, 20742, USA
¹⁷ Department of Physics, Center for Cosmology and Astro-Particle Physics, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, 43210, USA
¹⁸ Department of Astronomy, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, 43210, USA
¹⁹ Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, 2100, Copenhagen, Denmark
²⁰ Department of Physics, TU Dortmund University, 44221, Dortmund, Germany
²¹ Department of Physics, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, T6G 2E1, Canada
²² Erlangen Centre for Astroparticle Physics, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, 91058, Erlangen, Germany
²³ Département de physique nucléaire et corpusculaire, Université de Genève, 1211, Geneva, Switzerland
²⁴ Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Gent, 9000, Ghent, Belgium
²⁵ Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of California, Irvine, CA, 92697, USA
²⁶ Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, 66045, USA
²⁷ Department of Astronomy, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, 53706, USA
²⁸ Department of Physics, Wisconsin IceCube Particle Astrophysics Center, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, 53706, USA
²⁹ Institute of Physics, University of Mainz, Staudinger Weg 7, 55099, Mainz, Germany
³⁰ Université de Mons, 7000, Mons, Belgium
³¹ Technische Universität München, 85748, Garching, Germany
³² Department of Physics and Astronomy, Bartol Research Institute, University of Delaware, Newark, DE, 19716, USA
³³ Department of Physics, University of Oxford, 1 Keble Road, Oxford, OX1 3NP, UK
³⁴ Physics Department, South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, Rapid City, SD, 57701, USA
³⁵ Department of Physics, University of Wisconsin, River Falls, WI, 54022, USA
³⁶ Department of Physics, Oskar Klein Centre, Stockholm University, 10691, Stockholm, Sweden
³⁷ Department of Physics and Astronomy, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, 11794-3800, USA
³⁸ Department of Physics, Sungkyunkwan University, Suwon, 440-746, Korea
³⁹ Department of Physics, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, M5S 1A7, Canada
⁴⁰ Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL, 35487, USA
⁴¹ Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, 16802, USA
⁴² Department of Physics, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, 16802, USA
⁴³ Department of Physics and Astronomy, Uppsala University, Box 516, 75120, Uppsala, Sweden
⁴⁴ Department of Physics, University of Wuppertal, 42119, Wuppertal, Germany
⁴⁵ DESY, 15735, Zeuthen, Germany

^* e-mail: reimann@physik.rwth-aachen.de

Received: 27 June 2014
Accepted: 11 December 2014
Published online: 20 January 2015

Abstract

Dark matter which is bound in the Galactic halo might self-annihilate and produce a flux of stable final state particles, e.g. high energy neutrinos. These neutrinos can be detected with IceCube, a cubic-kilometer sized Cherenkov detector. Given IceCube’s large field of view, a characteristic anisotropy of the additional neutrino flux is expected. In this paper we describe a multipole method to search for such a large-scale anisotropy in IceCube data. This method uses the expansion coefficients of a multipole expansion of neutrino arrival directions and incorporates signal-specific weights for each expansion coefficient. We apply the technique to a high-purity muon neutrino sample from the Northern Hemisphere. The final result is compatible with the null-hypothesis. As no signal was observed, we present limits on the self-annihilation cross-section averaged over the relative velocity distribution down to for a dark matter particle mass of 700–1,000 GeV and direct annihilation into . The resulting exclusion limits come close to exclusion limits from -ray experiments, that focus on the outer Galactic halo, for high dark matter masses of a few TeV and hard annihilation channels.