Sterile neutrinos and indirect dark matter searches in IceCube

Abstract

If light sterile neutrinos exist and mix with the active neutrino flavors, this mixing will affect the propagation of high-energy neutrinos from dark matter annihilation in the Sun. In particular, new Mikheyev-Smirnov-Wolfenstein resonances can occur, leading to almost complete conversion of some active neutrino flavors into sterile states. We demonstrate how this can weaken IceCube limits on neutrino capture and annihilation in the Sun and how potential future conflicts between IceCube constraints and direct detection or collider data might be resolved by invoking sterile neutrinos. We also point out that, if the dark matter--nucleon scattering cross section and the allowed annihilation channels are precisely measured in direct detection and collider experiments in the future, IceCube can be used to constrain sterile neutrino models using neutrinos from the dark matter annihilation.

13 pages, 5 figures; v2: minor corrections and improvements to numerical results, added section about dependence of IceCube limits on sterile neutrino parameters; v3: minor clarifications and additional references, matches published version

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Cited by in corpus (10)

• Light Sterile Neutrinos: A White Paper
• Solar Atmospheric Neutrinos and the Sensitivity Floor for Solar Dark Matter Annihilation Searches
• Calculation of oscillation probabilities of atmospheric neutrinos using nuCraft
• Sterile neutrinos in the light of IceCube
• High-energy neutrino signals from the Sun in dark matter scenarios with internal bremsstrahlung
• Searching for High Energy Neutrino counterpart signals; The case of the Fermi Bubbles signal and of Dark Matter annihilation in the inner Galaxy
• Indirect Dark Matter Detection in the Light of Sterile Neutrinos
• Dark Gamma Ray Bursts
• Non-standard interactions and neutrinos from dark matter annihilation in the Sun
• Cosmic Birefringence as a probe of dark matter nature: Sterile neutrino and dipolar dark matter