Multi-messenger hunts for heavy WIMPs

TL;DR

This paper explores the potential of the KM3NeT neutrino detector to detect heavy leptophilic fermionic dark matter particles, linking collider physics, cosmology, and indirect detection methods, especially focusing on ultra-faint dwarf galaxies.

Contribution

It proposes a novel approach using neutrino detection to probe heavy leptophilic dark matter models associated with the Madala hypothesis.

Findings

KM3NeT can effectively search for heavy leptophilic fermionic dark matter.

Ultra-faint dwarf galaxies like Triangulum II are promising targets.

Neutrino detection offers an alternative to gamma-ray methods for such dark matter searches.

Abstract

Heavy neutrinos have a long history of consideration in the literature, in particular related to their role as solutions to the problems of neutrino mass, baryon asymmetry, and possibly dark matter. Interestingly, recent developments in the Madala hypothesis, a standard model extension designed to explain persistent LHC lepton anomalies, may also necessitate a heavy neutrino. This prospect is exciting as a dark matter model consisting of a TeV-scale leptophilic fermionic particle is also invoked to explain the electron-positron excess observed by the DAMPE experiment. The tantalising similarities between these new fermions may allow indirect dark matter detection methods to probe empirically compelling standard model extensions, like the Madala hypothesis. However, the leptophilic nature and large mass mean the expected gamma-ray signatures of annihilation or decay are weaker than those in the traditionally considered heavy quark and tau lepton channels. In this work we explore whether the KM3NeT neutrino detector could take advantage of the leptophilic nature of the added particle to provide an alternative means of exploring such interesting connections between cosmology and collider physics. We demonstrate that dwarf galaxies, in particular highly dense ultra-faint dwarf galaxies like Triangulum II, provide very strong prospects for KM3NeT searches.