High energy neutrinos from superheavy dark matter annihilation

Abstract

Superheavy (M > 10 10 GeV) particles produced during inflation may be the dark matter, independent of their interaction strength. Strongly interacting superheavy particles will be captured by the sun, and their annihilation in the center of the sun will produce a flux of energetic neutrinos that should be detectable by neutrino telescopes. Depending on the particle mass, event rates in a cubic-kilometer detector range from several per hour to several per year. The signature of the process is a predominance of tau neutrinos, with a relatively flat energy spectrum of events ranging from 50 GeV to many TeV, and with the mean energy of detected tau neutrinos about 3 TeV.

Closing the window on strongly interacting dark matter with IceCube

“…Annihilations into top quarks is therefore a promising channel to produce high energetic neutrinos detectable by neutrino telescopes. Bottom quarks are also a potential source of high energy neutrinos [6]. However in this work we only consider neutrinos produced from the top decay chain, which makes our results conservative.…”

“…In order to estimate the neutrino rate from simpzilla annihilations in the Sun, we use the capture rate, as well as the full-flavour neutrino flux and energy spectrum at the core of the Sun as determined in [6]. We then simulate the neutrino propagation to the Earth, including energy losses and oscillation effects.…”

“…The large mass will prevent the particle to ever get into thermal equilibrium with the primordial plasma. Super-massive dark matter candidates were coined wimpzillas [5] if assumed to interact weakly with matter and simpzillas [6] if the interaction is strong. The production mechanism discussed in [3,4] favours particles with masses of the order of the inflaton mass (∼10 12 GeV), but particles of masses as low as a few hundred GeV can also be produced, normally denoted as strongly interacting massive particles (SIMPs).…”

High energy tau neutrinos

“…among others: active galactic nuclei (AGN) [4]; topological defects (TD) such as superconducting, ordinary or VHS cosmic strings [5][6][7]; supermassive gauge and scalar particle (X-particle) decay or annihilation [8]; and Hawking evaporation of primordial black holes (PBH) [9][10][11]. Also, neutrinos can originate from the decay of photoproduced hadrons on the cosmic background radiation (CMB).…”

Neutrino signals from solar neutralino annihilations in anomaly mediated supersymmetry breaking model

“…The latter ones detect the final stable particles, including neutrinos, antiprotons, positrons, antinuclei and photons, which are produced by dark matter annihilation. In this paper we will focus on the observation by neutrino telescopes which detect the high energy neutrinos from dark matter annihilations (for some recent works, see [10,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27] [34] and ANTARES [35] etc. In this paper we will focus on the neutrino detection at IceCube.…”