Cosmic Ray-Boosted Dark Matter at IceCube

TL;DR

This paper investigates the potential of IceCube to detect cosmic ray-boosted dark matter, especially at lower energies, by analyzing scattering with electrons and nuclei in specific dark matter models.

Contribution

It revisits CR upscattered dark matter detection at IceCube, including lower energy data and detailed scattering computations for two benchmark dark matter models.

Findings

IceCube can detect dark matter below 100 keV via electron scattering.

Detection is possible for MeV-scale dark matter via nucleon scattering.

The study compares model projections with current experimental constraints.

Abstract

Cosmic ray (CR) upscattering of dark matter is considered as one of the most straightforward mechanisms to accelerate ambient dark matter, making it detectable at high threshold, large volume experiments. In this work, we revisit CR upscattered dark matter signals at the IceCube detector, focusing on lower energy data than was considered before. We consider both scattering with electrons and nuclei. In the latter, we include both elastic and deep-inelastic scattering computations. As concrete examples, we consider two benchmark models; Fermion dark matter with vector and scalar mediators. We compare our model projections with the most current constraints and show that the IceCube detector can detect CR-boosted dark matter especially with masses below $\sim$ 100 keV when scattering with electrons and $\sim$ MeV in the nucleon scattering case.