Paper detail

Neutrinos at IceCube from Heavy Decaying Dark Matter

A monochromatic line in the cosmic neutrino spectrum would be a smoking gun signature of dark matter. It is intriguing that the IceCube experiment has recently reported two PeV neutrino events with energies that may be equal up to experimental uncertainties, and which have a probability of being a background fluctuation estimated to be less than a percent. Here we explore prospects for these events to be the first indication of a monochromatic line signal from dark matter. While measurable annihilation signatures would seem to be impossible at such energies, we discuss the dark matter quantum numbers, effective operators, and lifetimes which could lead to an appropriate signal from dark matter decays. We will show that the set of possible decay operators is rather constrained, and will focus on several viable candidates which could explain the IceCube events; R-parity violating gravitinos, hidden sector gauge bosons, and singlet fermions in an extra dimension. In essentially all cases we find that a PeV neutrino line signal from dark matter would be accompanied by a potentially observable continuum spectrum of neutrinos rising towards lower energies.