ETD

Archivio digitale delle tesi discusse presso l'Università di Pisa

Tesi etd-09042013-090528


Tipo di tesi
Tesi di laurea magistrale
Autore
BARATELLA, PIETRO
URN
etd-09042013-090528
Titolo
Neutrinos from Dark Matter annihilation inside the Sun
Dipartimento
FISICA
Corso di studi
FISICA
Relatori
relatore Prof. Strumia, Alessandro
Parole chiave
  • Nessuna parola chiave trovata
Data inizio appello
25/09/2013
Consultabilità
Completa
Riassunto
Under the hypothesis that Dark Matter is made of weakly interacting massive particles which surround us,
we expect to see a signal of its presence in the form of a flux of highly energetic neutrinos coming from
the center of the Sun, where they are created in the process of DM-DM annihilation into Standard Model particles.
An overdensity of DM particles is expected there, since they can get trapped by Sun's gravity after
occasional scatterings with nuclei.

The detailed calculation of this flux is of crucial importance in the research field of Dark Matter
indirect detection. In this work we compute it for a broad range of DM masses and for all annihilation channels
into Standard Model particles, keeping track of both high and low energy neutrinos. Neutrino spectra at
production region, which we computed by means of Geant and corrected taking into account the electroweak effects,
are definitely not spectra which reach the Earth surface. So we follow the travel of neutrinos to reach Earth,
computing oscillations, matter effects and absorption, important for energetic neutrinos.
We also compute in detail the rate for capture of Dark Matter particles by the Sun which, under the plausible
assumption that capture and annihilation equilibrate, fixes the number of annihilation events per unit time:
they are half of the capture rate.

The final result will be a public code presenting the energy spectra of neutrino mass eigenstates before crossing
the Earth, together with a code that computes flavour spectra after having crossed the Earth with a generic zenith angle.
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