Decaying leptophilic dark matter at IceCube
- INFN, Laboratori Nazionali di Frascati,C.P. 13, Frascati, I-00044 (Italy)
- Dipartimento di Fisica, Università di Napoli “Federico II”,Complesso Univ. Monte S. Angelo, Via Cinthia, Napoli, I-80126 (Italy)
- INFN, Sezione di Napoli, Complesso Univ. Monte S. Angelo,Via Cinthia, Napoli, I-80126 (Italy)
We present a novel interpretation of IceCube high energy neutrino events (with energy larger than 60 TeV) in terms of an extraterrestrial flux due to two different contributions: a flux originated by known astrophysical sources and dominating IceCube observations up to few hundreds TeV, and a new flux component where the most energetic neutrinos come from the leptophilic three-body decays of dark matter particles with a mass of few PeV. Differently from other approaches, we provide two examples of elementary particle models that do not require extremely tiny coupling constants. We find the compatibility of the theoretical predictions with the IceCube results when the astrophysical flux has a cutoff of the order of 100 TeV (broken power law). In this case the most energetic part of the spectrum (PeV neutrinos) is due to an extra component such as the decay of a very massive dark matter component. Due to the low statistics at our disposal we have considered for simplicity the equivalence between deposited and neutrino energy, however such approximation does not affect dramatically the qualitative results. Of course, a purely astrophysical origin of the neutrino flux (no cutoff in energy below the PeV scale — unbroken power law) is still allowed. If future data will confirm the presence of a sharp cutoff above few PeV this would be in favor of a dark matter interpretation.
- Sponsoring Organization:
- SCOAP3, CERN, Geneva (Switzerland)
- OSTI ID:
- 22458420
- Journal Information:
- Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, Vol. 2015, Issue 12; Other Information: PUBLISHER-ID: JCAP12(2015)055; OAI: oai:repo.scoap3.org:13256; Article funded by SCOAP3. Content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.; Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 1475-7516
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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