Neutrinos at IceCube from heavy decaying dark matter

By B. Feldstein, A. Kusenko, S. Matsumoto, T. Yanagida. 2013

167 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A monochromatic line in the cosmic neutrino spectrum would be a smoking gun signature of dark matter. It is intriguing that the IceCube experiment has recently reported two PeV neutrino events with energies that may be equal up to experimental uncertainties, and which have a probability of being a background fluctuation estimated to be less than a percent. Here we explore prospects for these events to be the first indication of a monochromatic line signal from dark matter. While measurable annihilation signatures would seem to be impossible at such energies, we discuss the dark matter quantum numbers, effective operators, and lifetimes which could lead to an appropriate signal from dark matter decays. We will show that the set of possible decay operators is rather constrained, and will focus on several viable candidates which could explain the IceCube events; R-parity violating gravitinos, hidden sector gauge bosons, and singlet fermions in an extra dimension. In essentially all cases we find that a PeV neutrino line signal from dark matter would be accompanied by a potentially observable continuum spectrum of neutrinos rising towards lower energies.

Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0215a6b9d82cd8b3d783bd3a264c5cd3228e6dc1

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In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

1. S. Ando
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4. L. Roszkowski
5. S. Trojanowski
6. Kohta Murase

Citations in the corpus

• WIMP dark matter candidates and searches—current status and future prospects (2017, background): “Various possible explanations were proposed including neutrino production through annihilations [424] or decays [425] of the DM particles.”
• Star-forming galaxies as the origin of diffuse high-energy backgrounds: gamma-ray and neutrino connections, and implications for starburst history (2014, background): “More exotic models such as the PeV dark matter decay scenarios have been suggested too [44, 45].”