Neutrino Oscillation Effects in Indirect Detection of Dark Matter

Abstract

If neutrino oscillation plays a role in explaining the atmospheric neutrino deficit, then the same phenomenon would necessarily affect also the dark matter indirect-detection signal which consists in a muon-neutrino flux produced by neutralino annihilation in the Earth core. In this paper we investigate to which extent the upgoing-muon signal originated by neutralinos captured inside the Earth would be affected by the presence of nu_mu -> nu_tau oscillation.