Dark Matter Annihilation inside Large Volume Neutrino Detectors
Abstract
New particles in theories beyond the standard model can manifest as stable relics that interact strongly with visible matter and make up a small fraction of the total dark matter abundance. Such particles represent an interesting physics target since they can evade existing bounds from direct detection due to their rapid thermalization in high-density environments. In this work we point out that their annihilation to visible matter inside large-volume neutrino telescopes can provide a new way to constrain or discover such particles. The signal is the most pronounced for relic masses in the GeV range, and can be efficiently constrained by existing Super-Kamiokande searches for di-nucleon annihilation. We also provide an explicit realization of this scenario in the form of secluded dark matter coupled to a dark photon, and we show that the present method implies novel and stringent bounds on the model that are complementary to direct constraints from beam dumps, colliders, and direct detection experiments.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2303.03416,
title = {Dark Matter Annihilation inside Large Volume Neutrino Detectors},
author = {David McKeen and David E. Morrissey and Maxim Pospelov and Harikrishnan Ramani and Anupam Ray},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2303.03416},
year = {2023}
}
Comments
v2: 7 pages, 2 figures. Conclusions Unchanged. Matches version Published in Physical Review Letters