Are IceCube neutrinos unveiling PeV-scale decaying dark matter?

By A. Esmaili, P. Serpico. 2013

180 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Recent observations by IceCube, notably two PeV cascades accompanied by events at energies ∼ (30–400) TeV, are clearly in excess over atmospheric background fluxes and beg for an astroparticle physics explanation. Although some models of astrophysical accelerators can account for the observations within current statistics, intriguing features in the energy and possibly angular distributions of the events make worth exploring alternatives. Here, we entertain the possibility of interpreting the data with a few PeV mass scale decaying dark matter, with lifetime of the order of 1027 s. We discuss generic signatures of this scenario, including its unique energy spectrum distortion with respect to the benchmark Eν−2 expectation for astrophysical sources, as well as peculiar anisotropies. A direct comparison with the data show a good match with the above-mentioned features. We further discuss possible future checks of this scenario.

Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/54fea495b15c450afd41ae269f029d6e45cd71b3

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In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

1. S. Ando
2. I. Tamborra
3. Kohta Murase

Citations in the corpus

• 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].”