Future sensitivity of neutrino telescopes to dark matter annihilations from the cosmic diffuse neutrino signal

TL;DR

This paper estimates the future sensitivity of neutrino telescopes to dark matter annihilations by calculating the diffuse neutrino background from halos across all redshifts, considering various models to account for uncertainties.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of the diffuse neutrino flux from dark matter halos and evaluates the potential of future neutrino telescopes to constrain dark matter properties.

Findings

Diffuse neutrino flux constrains dark matter annihilation cross section.

Constraints are complementary or better than Milky Way observations.

Large angular distance observations improve sensitivity.

Abstract

Cosmological observations and cold dark matter N-body simulations indicate that our Universe is populated by numerous halos, where dark matter particles annihilate, potentially producing Standard Model particles. In this paper we calculate the contribution to the diffuse neutrino background from dark matter annihilations in halos at all redshifts and we estimate the future sensitivity to the annihilation cross section of neutrino telescopes such as IceCube or ANTARES. We consider various parametrizations to describe the internal halo properties and for the halo mass function in order to bracket the theoretical uncertainty in the limits from the modeling of the cosmological annihilation flux. We find that observations of the cosmic diffuse neutrino flux at large angular distances from the galactic center lead to constraints on the dark matter annihilation cross section which are complementary to (and for some extrapolations of the astrophysical parameters, better than) those stemming from observations of the Milky Way halo, especially for neutrino telescopes not pointing directly to the Milky Way center, as is the case of IceCube.