Upper Limits on WIMP Annihilation Cross Sections with IceCube DeepCore

Dark matter is approximately five times more abundant than baryonic matter, but its particle nature continues to elude physicists. One proposed candidate is a Weakly-Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP), which is predicted by supersymmetry and expected to have many of the observed properties of dark matter, including no electromagnetic interactions and interacting primarily via gravity and weak-scale forces. These weak-scale interactions open up the possibility of WIMPs annihilating into Standard Model particles like neutrinos, which are observable by neutrino detectors like IceCube. Under this hypothesis, IceCube can search for signals of neutrinos coming from WIMP annihilation, or set upper limits on the WIMP annihilation cross section in the event of a non-detection. One prime location for WIMP annihilation is a dwarf galaxy, which is relatively rich in dark matter and has a relatively low neutrino background compared to a Milky Way-sized galaxy. We present upper limits on the annihilation cross section for GeV-scale WIMPs annihilating in dwarf galaxies, highlighting a substantial improvement in the limits for WIMP annihilation into quarks.