Search for secluded dark matter towards the Galactic Centre with the ANTARES neutrino telescope

TL;DR

This paper reports on a search for secluded dark matter using the ANTARES neutrino telescope, setting upper limits on annihilation cross sections for masses up to 6 PeV, exploring a mass range beyond collider reach.

Contribution

It presents the first indirect search for secluded dark matter at PeV energies with neutrino data, extending the mass range beyond previous limits.

Findings

Upper limits on dark matter annihilation cross section up to 6 PeV.

Constraints on secluded dark matter models from neutrino observations.

No detection of dark matter signals within the analyzed data.

Abstract

Searches for dark matter (DM) have not provided any solid evidence for the existence of weakly interacting massive particles in the GeV-TeV mass range. Coincidentally, the scale of new physics is being pushed by collider searches well beyond the TeV domain. This situation strongly motivates the exploration of DM masses much larger than a TeV. Secluded scenarios contain a natural way around the unitarity bound on the DM mass, via the early matter domination induced by the mediator of its interactions with the Standard Model. High-energy neutrinos constitute one of the very few direct accesses to energy scales above a few TeV. An indirect search for secluded DM signals has been performed with the ANTARES neutrino telescope using data from 2007 to 2015. Upper limits on the DM annihilation cross section for DM masses up to 6 PeV are presented and discussed.