Probing Dark Matter Dynamics via Earthborn Neutrinos at IceCube

TL;DR

This paper explores how dark matter annihilation in Earth's interior could produce detectable neutrinos at IceCube, providing insights into dark matter properties and complementing direct detection efforts.

Contribution

It introduces a model-independent analysis showing Earth-based neutrino signals can be enhanced due to low-velocity dark matter annihilation, offering a new detection avenue.

Findings

Earth neutrino flux can be significantly increased by dark matter annihilation.

IceCube has potential to detect earthborn neutrinos from dark matter.

Combined data from neutrino telescopes and direct detection can reveal dark matter dynamics.

Abstract

Recent results from PAMELA and ATIC hint that O(TeV) dark matter (DM) is annihilating, in our galactic neighborhood, predominantly to leptons. The annihilation rate is much larger now than during freeze-out, one possible explanation of this is a low-velocity enhancement of the annihilation cross section. In a model independent fashion, we show that in this case the rate of neutrino emission from the Earth, due to DM annihilation, may be greatly enhanced while the rate from the Sun is unaltered. There is potential for IceCube to see these earthborn neutrinos while the same parameter space will be soon covered by direct detection experiments. Combining these near-future data will allow extraction of valuable information about the DM sector dynamics.