# A Dark Matter Interpretation of the ANITA Anomalous Events

## TL;DR

This paper proposes that the ANITA anomalous events are due to decaying super-heavy dark matter producing neutrinos that generate detectable air showers, aligning with some IceCube observations.

## Contribution

It introduces a dark matter decay model explaining upward air showers with specific energies and angles, connecting ANITA and IceCube data.

## Key findings

- Dark matter decay can produce neutrinos leading to detectable air showers.
- Monte Carlo simulations match observed ANITA and IceCube event features.
- Expected event rates are consistent with observations at different energies.

## Abstract

The ANITA collaboration recently reported the detection of two anomalous upward-propagating extensive air showers exiting the Earth with relatively large emergence angles and energies in the range $\mathcal{O}(0.5\!-\!1)~\mathrm{EeV}$. We interpret these two events as coming from the decay of a massive dark-matter candidate ($m_\text{DM}\!\gtrsim\! 10^{9}~\mathrm{GeV}$) decaying into a pair of right-handed neutrinos. While propagating through the Earth, these extremely boosted decay products convert eventually to $\tau$-leptons which loose energy during their propagation and produce showers in the atmosphere detectable by ANITA at emergence angles larger than what Standard-Model neutrinos could ever produce. We performed Monte Carlo simulations to estimate the propagation and energy loss effects and derived differential effective areas and number of events for the ANITA and the IceCube detectors. Interestingly, the expected number of events for IceCube is of the very same order of magnitude than the number of events observed by ANITA but at larger emergence angles, and energies $\lesssim 0.1~\mathrm{EeV}$. Such features match perfectly with the presence of the two upward-going events IceCube-140109 and IceCube-121205 that have been exhibited from a recent re-analysis of IceCube data samples.