Probing Dark Matter with Neutrino Telescopes

by Andrew Cheek

Thursday Jul 9, 2026, 12:00 PM → 1:30 PM Europe/Madrid

IFAE Seminar Room (In-Person)

Neutrino telescopes offer a powerful channel for indirect dark matter (DM) detection. The recent ultra-high-energy neutrino event KM3-230213A, detected by KM3NeT at approximately 220 PeV, has been proposed as a possible signature of decaying super-heavy dark matter. At first glance this interpretation appears disfavored, as the event's arrival direction points away from the Galactic Centre.I present a statistical method for quantifying the likelihood that this event originates from DM decay, and for determining how many additional events would be required to confirm or rule out this hypothesis. I then discuss a recent sensitivity study for Galactic Centre DM annihilations with the planned TRIDENT neutrino telescope. We find that TRIDENT can reach the thermal relic cross-section benchmark for DM masses between 1–100 TeV, and we contextualize this result within the broader DM landscape by studying a specific dark matter model. Furthermore, our analysis is the first of its kind to account for the stochastic nature of the Galactic plane neutrino background, whose measurement will itself be an important astrophysical result. I conclude with a brief discussion of ongoing work and future directions.