Neutrinos and dark matter

Neutrinos could be key particles to unravel the nature of the dark matter of the Universe. On the one hand, sterile neutrinos in minimal extensions of the Standard Model are excellent dark matter candidates, producing potentially observable signals in the form of a line in the X-ray sky. On the other hand, the annihilation or the decay of dark matter particles produces, in many plausible dark matter scenarios, a neutrino flux that could be detected at neutrino telescopes, thus providing non-gravitational evidence for dark matter. More conservatively, the non-observation of a significant excess in the neutrino fluxes with respect to the expected astrophysical backgrounds can be used to constrain dark matter properties, such as the self-annihilation cross section, the scattering cross section with nucleons and the lifetime.