Prospects for Detecting Neutrino Signals from Annihilating/Decaying Dark Matter to Account for the PAMELA and ATIC results

TL;DR

This paper investigates the potential for neutrino telescopes like IceCube and Antares to detect signals from dark matter annihilation or decay, which could explain PAMELA and ATIC cosmic ray excesses, focusing on neutrino fluxes from muon and tau final states.

Contribution

The study calculates neutrino fluxes from dark matter processes and assesses the detectability of these signals with current neutrino telescopes, highlighting the differences between annihilating and decaying dark matter scenarios.

Findings

Antares and IceCube can potentially detect neutrino signals from annihilating dark matter.

Detection of neutrinos from decaying dark matter is very challenging.

Neutrino signals are more promising from Galactic center or large subhalos in annihilating dark matter scenario.

Abstract

Recent PAMELA data show that positron fraction has an excess above several GeV while anti-proton one is not. Moreover ATIC data indicates that electron/positron flux have a bump from 300 GeV to 800 GeV. Both annihilating dark matter (DM) with large boost factor and decaying DM with the life around $ 10^{26} s$ can account for the PAMELA and ATIC observations if their main final products are charged leptons ($e$, $\mu$ and $\tau$). In this work, we calculated the neutrino flux arising from $\mu$ and $\tau$ which originate from annihilating/decaying DM, and estimated the final muon rate in the neutrino telescopes, namely Antares and IceCube. Given the excellent angular resolution, Antares and IceCube are promising to discover the neutrino signals from Galactic center and/or large DM subhalo in annihilating DM scenario, but very challenging in decaying DM scenario.