Hadronically decaying heavy dark matter and high-energy neutrino limits

Abstract

We consider dark matter consisting of long--living particles with masses $10^{7}~\lesssim~M~\lesssim~10^{16}$ GeV decaying through hadronic channel as a source of high energy neutrino. Using recent data on high energy neutrino from IceCube and Pierre Auger experiments we derive the upper-limits on neutrino flux from dark matter decay and constraints on dark matter parameter space. For the dark matter masses of order $10^8$ GeV the constraints derived are slightly stronger than those obtained for the same dark matter model using the high energy gamma-ray limits.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figures, minor corrections in text, results unchanged, published in JETP Letter

Heavy decaying dark matter and IceCube high energy neutrinos

“…This study complements our previous works [19,39,44] on HDM constraints applying high-energy gamma rays, neutrinos and cosmic-ray anisotropy data. The paper is organized as follows: In Sec.…”

“…These results were then used in more recent studies like those of Refs. [19,39,44], where both new constraints on γ-ray fluxes and the neutrino flux measurements of IceCube were applied. In contrast, the leptonic decay channel has received much less attention.…”

“…We build HDM constraints with the neutrino data using the procedure discussed in detail in Ref. [19]. Namely, we compare the observed number of neutrino events with the number predicted by the model assuming the exposure of the particular experiment [79].…”

“…[8], HDM decays as explanation for the IceCube neutrino flux were studied in detail in several works assuming different particle physics models [9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18]. It was shown, that while explanations of the IceCube data using hadronically decaying HDM are in tension with the diffuse gamma-ray flux limits [15,19], models with leptonic decays are not, remaining viable candidates for the explanation of the neutrino flux. In this work we reconsider the allowed range of HDM masses compatible with the IceCube EHE events, using recently updated limits on the diffuse gamma-ray flux from the KASCADE collaboration.…”

“…The two main parameters of a HDM particle, its mass M X and lifetime τ , can be constrained comparing the flux of high-energy particles produced by decaying HDM particles with observations. Constraints used are the shape of the cosmic ray spectrum and the anisotropy of the cosmic ray flux [38][39][40], gamma-ray flux limits [15,[41][42][43][44][45] and neutrino data [15,17,19,[46][47][48].…”