NBIA Seminar: Marco Chianese

Despite efforts to detect it through astrophysical and lab-based observations, the nature of dark matter still remains a mystery. The long-prevailing paradigm of a Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP) at the electroweak energy scale is facing a crisis due to the absence of its evidence in particle colliders and direct-detection experiments. In this framework, multimessenger indirect searches are crucial to probe non-WIMP dark matter particles. In this talk, I will discuss the role played by neutrino telescopes in studying the properties of heavy dark matter particles. In particular, I will analyze current and future neutrino observations at different energy scales: the atmospheric neutrinos (below 100 TeV), the astrophysical neutrinos recently observed by IceCube (100 TeV - 10 PeV), and the expected cosmogenic neutrinos (above 10 PeV). Concerning IceCube data, I will describe in detail the possible dark matter interpretation of the observed excess of neutrinos at about 100 TeV. Moreover, I will discuss in a multimessenger context the sensitivity of the up-coming KM3NeT telescope and the next-generation neutrino radio telescopes such as RNO-G, GRAND and IceCube-Gen2 to look for dark matter signals. Neutrino telescopes will be able to competitively probe significant still-unexplored portions of the dark matter parameter space.