Early Decay of Peccei-Quinn Fermion and the IceCube Neutrino Events

Abstract

IceCube observed high-energy neutrino flux in the energy region from TeV to PeV. The decay of a massive long-lived particle in the early universe can be the origin of the IceCube neutrino events, which we call an "early decay scenario." In this paper, we construct a particle physics model that contains such a massive long-lived particle based on the Peccei-Quinn model. We calculate the present neutrino flux, taking account of realistic initial energy distributions of particles produced by the decay of the massive long-lived particle. We show that the early decay scenario naturally fits into the Peccei-Quinn model, and that the neutrino flux observed by IceCube can be explained in such a framework. We also see that, based on that model, a consistent cosmological history that explains the abundance of the massive long-lived particle is realized.

20 pages, 2 figures; v2: references added; v3: version accepted for publication in PLB

References in corpus (16)

• PYTHIA 6.4 Physics and Manual
• The automated computation of tree-level and next-to-leading order differential cross sections, and their matching to parton shower simulations
• The spectrum of isotropic diffuse gamma-ray emission between 100 MeV and 820 GeV
• Observation and Characterization of a Cosmic Muon Neutrino Flux from the Northern Hemisphere using six years of IceCube data
• Flavor Ratio of Astrophysical Neutrinos above 35 TeV in IceCube
• Higgsino Dark Matter in High-Scale Supersymmetry
• Spectral analysis of the high-energy IceCube neutrinos
• IceCube events and decaying dark matter: hints and constraints
• Boosted Dark Matter in IceCube and at the Galactic Center
• Neutrinoful Universe
• High-energy neutrinos from radio galaxies
• The Direct Detection of Boosted Dark Matter at High Energies and PeV events at IceCube
• Analysis of the 4-year IceCube high-energy starting events
• The diffuse gamma-ray flux associated with sub-PeV/PeV neutrinos from starburst galaxies
• Possible Interpretations of IceCube High-Energy Neutrino Events
• Galactic PeV neutrinos from dark matter annihilation

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Snowmass White Paper: Beyond the Standard Model effects on Neutrino Flavor
• High-energy Neutrinos from Multi-body Decaying Dark Matter
• Probing decaying heavy dark matter with the 4-year IceCube HESE data
• IC at IC: IceCube can constrain the intrinsic charm of the proton
• PeV scale Supersymmetry breaking and the IceCube neutrino flux