http://arxiv.org/abs/2108.13412
Dark matter particles can be gravitationally trapped by celestial bodies, motivating searches for localized annihilation or decay. If neutrinos are among the decay products, then IceCube and other neutrino observatories could detect them. We investigate this scenario for dark matter particles above $m_{\chi} \gtrsim$ PeV producing tau neutrino signals. At these energies, tau neutrino regeneration is an important effect during propagation through Earth, allowing detection at distances far longer than one interaction length. We show how large energy loss of tau leptons above $\sim$ PeV drives a wide range of initial energies to the same final energy spectrum of “secondary” tau neutrinos at the detector. This enables an experiment to constrain decays that occur at very high energies, and we examine the reach of IceCube high-energy starting event (HESE) in the parameter space of trapped dark matter annihilations and decays above PeV. As a result, we see that it is difficult to explain Earth emerging taus in terms of heavy dark matter decays.
M. Saveliev and J. Hyde
Tue, 31 Aug 21
55/73
Comments: 9 pages, 4 figures