Decaying Leptophilic Dark Matter at IceCube
Sofiane M. Boucenna, Marco Chianese, Gianpiero Mangano, Gennaro Miele,, Stefano Morisi, Ofelia Pisanti, and Edoardo Vitagliano

TL;DR
This paper proposes that high-energy neutrinos detected by IceCube can be explained by a combination of astrophysical sources and leptophilic dark matter decays, with models that do not require extremely small couplings.
Contribution
It introduces two elementary particle models for dark matter decay that fit IceCube data without tiny couplings and discusses the spectral features consistent with a cutoff around 100 TeV.
Findings
Compatibility of models with IceCube data when astrophysical flux has a 100 TeV cutoff
Dark matter decay can account for PeV neutrinos if a spectral cutoff is observed
Purely astrophysical explanations remain possible without a cutoff
Abstract
We present a novel interpretation of IceCube high energy neutrino events (with energy larger than 60 TeV) in terms of an extraterrestrial flux due to two different contributions: a flux originated by known astrophysical sources and dominating IceCube observations up to few hundreds TeV, and a new flux component where the most energetic neutrinos come from the leptophilic three-body decays of dark matter particles with a mass of few PeV. Differently from other approaches, we provide two examples of elementary particle models that do not require extremely tiny coupling constants. We find the compatibility of the theoretical predictions with the IceCube results when the astrophysical flux has a cutoff of the order of 100 TeV (broken power law). In this case the most energetic part of the spectrum (PeV neutrinos) is due to an extra component such as the decay of a very massive dark matter…
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