Low energy IceCube data and a possible Dark Matter related excess

TL;DR

This paper investigates a 2-sigma excess of IceCube neutrino events between 60 and 100 TeV, analyzing their origins and the potential role of dark matter interactions, while emphasizing the need for future neutrino observations.

Contribution

It compares the spatial distribution of IceCube events with astrophysical and dark matter models, providing forecasts for future neutrino telescope capabilities.

Findings

Disfavors correlation with the galactic plane.

Rules out dark matter annihilation with low clumpiness.

Highlights the need for more data to distinguish sources.

Abstract

In this Letter we focus our attention on the IceCube events in the energy range between 60 and 100 TeV, which show an order 2-sigma excess with respect to a power-law with spectral index 2. We analyze the possible origin of such an excess by comparing the distribution of the arrival directions of IceCube events with the angular distributions of simply distributed astrophysical galactic/extragalactic sources, as well as with the expected flux coming from DM interactions (decay and annihilation) for different DM profiles. The statistical analysis performed seems to disfavor the correlation with the galactic plane, whereas rules out the DM annihilation scenario only in case of small clumpiness effect. The small statistics till now collected does not allow to scrutinize the cases of astrophysical isotropic distribution and DM decay scenarios. For this reason we perform a forecast analysis in order to stress the role of future Neutrino Telescopes.