Heavy decaying dark matter at future neutrino radio telescopes

TL;DR

Future neutrino radio telescopes like RNO-G, GRAND, and IceCube-gen2 can significantly constrain heavy decaying dark matter properties by detecting ultra-high-energy neutrinos, complementing existing multi-messenger methods.

Contribution

This study forecasts the sensitivity of upcoming neutrino radio telescopes to heavy dark matter decay, exploring various decay channels and masses, and establishing competitive constraints.

Findings

Projected constraints on dark matter lifetime are competitive with existing methods.

Neutrino telescopes can probe dark matter masses from 10^7 to 10^15 GeV.

Constraints are highly complementary to multi-messenger analyses.

Abstract

In the next decades, ultra-high-energy neutrinos in the EeV energy range will be potentially detected by next-generation neutrino telescopes. Although their primary goals are to observe cosmogenic neutrinos and to gain insight into extreme astrophysical environments, they can also indirectly probe the nature of dark matter. In this paper, we study the projected sensitivity of up-coming neutrino radio telescopes, such as RNO-G, GRAND and IceCube-gen2 radio array, to decaying dark matter scenarios. We investigate different dark matter decaying channels and masses, from $10^7$ to $10^{15}$ GeV. By assuming the observation of cosmogenic or newborn pulsar neutrinos, we forecast conservative constraints on the lifetime of heavy dark matter particles. We find that these limits are competitive with and highly complementary to previous multi-messenger analyses.