Prospects for Indirect Detection of Sneutrino Dark Matter with IceCube

Abstract

We investigate the prospects for indirect detection of right-handed sneutrino dark matter at the IceCube neutrino telescope in a $U(1{)}_{B-L}$ extension of the MSSM. The capture and annihilation of sneutrinos inside the Sun reach equilibrium, and the flux of produced neutrinos is governed by the sneutrino-proton elastic scattering cross section, which has an upper bound of $8\times 10^{-9}$ pb from the $Z^{\prime }$ mass limits in the $B-L$ model. Despite the absence of any spin-dependent contribution, the muon event rates predicted by this model can be detected at IceCube since sneutrinos mainly annihilate into leptonic final states by virtue of the fermion $B-L$ charges. These subsequently decay to neutrinos with 100% efficiency. The Earth muon event rates are too small to be detected for the standard halo model irrespective of an enhanced sneutrino annihilation cross section that can explain the recent PAMELA data. For modified velocity distributions, the Earth muon events increase substantially and can be greater than the IceCube detection threshold of 12 events ${\mathrm{km}}^{-2}$ ${\mathrm{yr}}^{-1}$. However, this only leads to a mild increase of about 30% for the Sun muon events. The number of muon events from the Sun can be as large as roughly 100 events ${\mathrm{km}}^{-2}$ ${\mathrm{yr}}^{-1}$ for this model.

13 pages, 9 figures, replaced to match the published version, only minor changes: addition of one reference in section 5, correction of two typos

References in corpus (8)

• Five-Year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) Observations: Cosmological Interpretation
• Observation of an anomalous positron abundance in the cosmic radiation
• A new measurement of the antiproton-to-proton flux ratio up to 100 GeV in the cosmic radiation
• Neutrinos from WIMP Annihilations Obtained Using a Full Three-Flavor Monte Carlo Approach
• Radiative B-L symmetry breaking in supersymmetric models
• Unifying inflation and dark matter with neutrino masses
• Mirage in the Sky: Non-thermal Dark Matter, Gravitino Problem, and Cosmic Ray Anomalies
• Probing Dark Matter Dynamics via Earthborn Neutrinos at IceCube

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Light mixed sneutrinos as thermal dark matter
• Mixed sneutrino dark matter in light of the 2011 XENON and LHC results
• Dark matter indirect detection signals and the nature of neutrinos in the supersymmetric $U(1{)}_{B-L}$ extension of the standard model
• Direct Detection Constraints on Dark Matter Event Rates in Neutrino Telescopes, and Collider Implications