Diffuse astrophysical neutrinos from dark matter around blazars

TL;DR

This paper proposes a novel mechanism where dark matter interactions around blazars produce high-energy neutrinos, potentially explaining IceCube observations and offering new avenues for dark matter detection.

Contribution

It introduces a new model for dark matter-induced neutrino production around blazars, covering various mediator types and matching observed IceCube flux levels.

Findings

Dark matter interactions can account for the diffuse neutrino flux observed by IceCube.

The model's predictions can be tested with future blazar observations.

Different mediator types influence the neutrino flux magnitude and spectrum.

Abstract

Neutrinos from blazars can originate from inelastic scatterings between protons within their jets and sub-GeV dark matter (DM) around them, explaining IceCube detections of neutrinos from TXS 0506+056 that are otherwise challenging for models of its jet. In this paper we calculate such DM-induced high-energy neutrinos, from TXS 0506+056 as well as from a stacked blazar sample, in the four cases where DM-quark interactions are mediated by a new massive vector, axial, scalar, and pseudoscalar particle. Intriguingly, we find that this mechanism can saturate the diffuse astrophysical neutrino flux observed by IceCube at high energies. Our mechanism will be tested by additional blazar observations and by various searches for sub-GeV DM.