Testing the stability of heavy dark matter with up-coming radio neutrino telescopes

Abstract

Astrophysical neutrinos with energies higher than > 10 PeV have not been measured yet, therefore, we do not know what kind of sources are contributing to this high energy neutrino flux. Concretely, we are interested in testing the hypothesis in which we have a hidden contribution coming from the decay of heavy dark matter particles. The first neutrino radio telescopes will be constructed during the following decade, having as a principal goal the detection of the cosmogenic neutrinos, and being able to disentangle the principal source contributing at these high energies for the astrophysical neutrino flux. In this work we study the projected sensitivity of up-coming neutrino radio telescopes, such as RNO-G, GRAND and IceCube-Gen2 radio array, to decaying dark matter scenarios. We perform a forecast analysis in order to place conservative constraints on the lifetime of dark matter within the range DM = [10 7 − 10 15 ] GeV after assuming the dominant astrophysical neutrino source, the one that will act as our background for the hidden dark matter signal. These forecasted limits open a new parameter space for some decaying channels, and complement the limits obtained for the channel due to its multi-messenger agreement.

News on Dark Matter from ICRC 2021

“…Other two proposed radio detectors are RNO-G, and a radio array to be installed in IceCube-Gen2. Sensitivities of these experiments for DM searches with neutrinos have been presented in [54,62]. Depending on the decay channel, these experiments have the potential to increase the sensitivity of current experiments to heavy decaying DM candidates, see fig.…”