Dark matter searches towards the sun with antares and positioning studies for km3net

Abstract

High energy Neutrinos are elusive particles: they are chargeless, have a very small cross section with ordinary matter and their mass is extremely small. Neutrinos are an important probe in the study of the origin of cosmic rays but also, following some models of physics Beyond the Standard Model, they can be produced from the decay of Standard Model particles produced by dark matter annihilation. In the last century, many new approaches have been developed in astroparticle physics, trying to solve the unsolved puzzles of the Universe such as the origin of Cosmic Rays and the existence of Dark Matter. Among the many experiments, neutrino telescopes certainly stand out. Neutrinos telescopes, made of large volume of a transparent medium observed by optical sensors, can detect high energy neutrinos from galactic or extra-galactic sources, and they can also be used for the study of neutrino properties. ANTARES and its successor KM3NeT are two neutrino telescopes located in the Mediterranean sea. ANTARES operations started in 2007 and it has taken data almost continuously until the beginning of 2022. KM3NeT, taking advantage from the experience of ANTARES, aims to be the most sensitive neutrino telescope in the next generation of detectors. This thesis presents my contributions to both detectors. In particular, the technical part of the work has been developed in collaboration with KM3NeT. It is devoted to the the study of data from the compasses installed in the KM3NeT detection elements: from their calibration before deployment to the analysis of their data in the sea. These compasses allow a tracking of the movements of the detector elements in the sea. In collaboration with ANTARES a physics analysis related to the search of dark matter annihilation in the Sun has been developed analyzing thirteen years of data. New upper limits for neutrino and antineutrino fluxes from dark matter annihilation in the Sun have been obtained, and from these upper limits on the Dark Matter - Nucleon scattering cross section have been obtained. These results improve previous ANTARES results by a factor of 2 and are competitive with those obtained by other experiments.