Boosted dark matter versus dark matter-induced neutrinos from single and stacked blazars

TL;DR

This paper explores how boosted dark matter from blazars could produce neutrino signals detectable by current observatories, offering a novel explanation for high-energy neutrino origins.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed calculation of neutrino signals from boosted dark matter interactions in blazars, considering multiple mediator types and stacking over many sources.

Findings

Boosted dark matter can account for high-energy neutrino observations.

Different mediator types influence the neutrino signal strength.

DM interactions do not disrupt the dark matter spike significantly.

Abstract

The physics responsible for the production of observed high-energy neutrinos have not been established so far, neither for the diffuse astrophysical ones nor for those detected from single blazars. We recently proposed that both could be explained by deep inelastic scatterings between sub-GeV dark matter (DM) around blazars and protons within their jets. Here, we compute the proton-recoil signals at the neutrino detectors Super-Kamiokande, KamLAND, Borexino, JUNO, Hyper-Kamiokande and DUNE induced by DM that is itself boosted by the scatterings with protons in blazar jets. We do it for the four cases of vector, axial, scalar and pseudoscalar mediators of DM-quark interactions. We perform the analysis for the single blazar TXS 0506+056 and for a sample of more than 300 stacked blazars. We find that searches for such blazar-boosted DM leave room for a variety of DM models to explain observations of high-energy neutrinos. We check that the depletion of the DM spike induced by DM-proton and DM-DM interactions does not compromise the DM interpretation for high-energy neutrinos, but challenges other blazar-DM signals.