IceCube at the Frontier of Macroscopic Dark Matter Direct Detection

TL;DR

This paper explores IceCube's potential to detect macroscopic dark matter through inelastic nuclear scattering, demonstrating its capability to probe dark matter masses up to one gram via GeV-scale electromagnetic signatures.

Contribution

It introduces a novel application of IceCube for macroscopic dark matter detection using inelastic scattering signatures, expanding the scope of dark matter searches.

Findings

IceCube can detect dark matter interactions depositing around 1 GeV energy.

The detector can probe dark matter masses up to one gram.

Simulations show promising discovery potential for macroscopic dark matter.

Abstract

For a class of macroscopic dark matter models, inelastic scattering of dark matter off a nucleus can generate electromagnetic signatures with GeV-scale energy. The IceCube detector, with its kilometer-scale size, is ideal for directly detecting such inelastic scattering. Based on the slow particle trigger for the DeepCore detector, we perform a detailed signal and background simulation to estimate the discovery potential. For order 1 GeV deposited energy in each interaction, we find that IceCube can probe the dark matter masses up to one gram.