BSc Defense: Rikke Stougaard Klausen

One of the fundamental questions in cosmology is the origin of dark matter that today constitutes one quarter of the total energy density of the Universe. The IceCube neutrino observatory can probe dark matter indirectly by the observation of neutrinos produced in the annihilation or decay of dark matter particles gravitationally clustered in the halo of the Milky Way. We will investigate the capability of the low-energy extension "IceCube Upgrade" to search for dark matter. We will study the expected fluxes of neutrinos from the annihilation or decay of 1 GeV to 1 TeV dark matter particles and use a maximum likelihood method to estimate sensitivities for the dark matter annihilation cross section and lifetime.