Speaker
Description
Annihilation of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) in the center of the sun($\odot$), earth($\oplus$) and the galaxy can give rise to neutrino-antineutrino pairs as their final products. We look at the prospects of detecting such neutrinos at the proposed 50-kt Iron Calorimeter (ICAL) detector, to be housed at the upcoming India-Based Neutrino Observatory (INO), wherein the interaction of neutrinos ($\nu_{\mu}/\bar{\nu}_{\mu}$) with detector iron layers will produce $\mu^{-}/\mu^{+}$. The atmospheric neutrinos in GeV range will pose a serious background to such signal neutrinos, which fortunately, can be suppressed considerably by exploiting the excellent angular resolution of the ICAL detector. The expected sensitivity limits for 500 kt-years of ICAL exposure are quite competitive to other neutrino experiments for the WIMP masses $m_{\chi}$) $<$ 100 GeV. The expected 90 % C.L. exclusion sensitivity limits for 500 kt-years exposure for $\tau^{+} \tau^{-}$ channel (100 % branching ratio) for WIMP-nucleon Spin Dependent ($\sigma_{SD}$) and Spin Independent $\sigma_{SI}$) cross-section are found to be $\sigma_{SD,\odot} < 6.87\times 10^{-41}$ cm$^2$ and $\sigma_{SI,\odot} < 7.75\times 10^{-43}$ cm$^2$ for the WIMP mass ($m_{\chi}$) = 25 GeV, and $\sigma_{SI,\oplus} =1.02\times 10^{-44}~\mathrm{cm}^2$ for $m_{\chi}$ =52.14 GeV. For galactic centre searches, the expected 90 % C.L. sensitivity limits on velocity averaged annihilation cross-section $\langle\sigma_{A}v\rangle$ for a 30 GeV WIMP, assuming NFW WIMP profile and 100\% branching ratio for each channel are: $\langle\sigma_{A}v\rangle \leq 1.19\times 10^{-22}~ \mathrm{cm}^3 \mathrm{s}^{-1}$ for the $\mu^{+} \mu^{-}$ channel and \langle\sigma_{A}v\rangle \leq 6.35\times 10^{-23} \mathrm{cm}^3 \mathrm{s}^{-1}$ for the $\nu ~\bar{\nu}$ channel.
| Collaboration name | INO |
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