Speaker
Description
Dark matter can accumulate in the center of the Earth as the planet moves through the Milky Way halo. Its annihilation into Standard Model particles can be probed through indirect searches, with neutrinos offering a unique messenger because they can escape dense regions. Neutrino telescopes, with their large volumes and broad energy coverage, therefore provide an opportunity to search for dark matter signals from the Earth's center. Such searches have typically been limited to dark matter masses below $\sim$ PeV because the Earth becomes opaque to very-high-energy neutrinos. In this talk,, we show that TeV--PeV neutrino telescopes can probe much heavier dark matter if it annihilates to tau neutrinos or tau leptons. Using 7.5 years of IceCube high-energy starting events,, we derive upper limits on the spin-independent dark matter--nucleon cross section for masses between $10^5$ and $10^{10}$ GeV. These results motivate dedicated searches with IceCube and future neutrino telescopes.