Upward muon signals at neutrino detectors as a probe of dark matter properties

TL;DR

This paper investigates how upward muon signals at neutrino detectors can be used to probe dark matter properties, focusing on distinguishing muon types to improve model discrimination.

Contribution

It introduces a method to differentiate showering and non-showering muons in neutrino detectors to better identify dark matter signals.

Findings

Showering and non-showering muons provide complementary information.

Discrimination improves dark matter model constraints.

Analysis applied to Super-Kamiokande data.

Abstract

We study upward muon flux at neutrino detectors such as Super-Kamiokande resulting from high-energy neutrinos produced by the dark matter annihilation/decay at the Galactic center. In particular, we distinguish showering and non-showering muons as their energy loss processes inside the detector, and show that this information is useful for discriminating dark matter models.