Signatures of dark matter in underground detectors

Abstract

The neutralino, the lightest superpartner in many supersymmetric theories, is arguably the leading dark-matter candidate from both the cosmological and particle-physics points of view. Its mass is bracketed by a minimum value of tens of GeV, determined from unsuccessful accelerator searches, and a maximum value of several TeV, above which neutralinos "overclose" the Universe. If neutralinos exist in our galactic halo, they will be gravitationally captured by scattering off elements in the Sun. Annihilation of neutralinos in the Sun will produce a neutrino flux which can be detected on Earth and thus provide indirect evidence for galactic dark matter. We show that a 1-km2 area is the natural scale of a neutrino telescope capable of probing the GeV-TeV neutralino mass range by searching for high-energy neutrinos produced by their annihilation in the Sun.