Speaker
Prof.
Rajesh Gandhi
(HRI)
Description
We study the implications of the premise that any new, relativistic,
highly energetic neutral particle that interacts with quarks and gluons would
create cascade-like events in the IceCube (IC) detector which would be
observationally indistinguishable from neutral current deep-inelastic (DIS) scattering
events due to neutrinos. Consequently, one reason for deviations, breaks or
excesses in the expected astrophysical power-law neutrino spectrum could be the
flux of such a particle. Motivated by features in the recent 1347-day IceCube
high energy starting event (HESE) data, we focus on particular boosted dark
matter ($\chi$) related realizations of this premise, where $\chi$ is assumed
to be much lighter than, and the result of, the slow decay of a massive
scalar ($\phi$) which constitutes a major fraction of the Universe's dark matter
(DM). We show that this hypothesis, coupled with a standard power-law
astrophysical neutrino flux is capable of providing very good fits to the present data, along
with a possible explanation of other features in the HESE sample: i.e., a) the
paucity of events beyond $\sim 2$ PeV b) a spectral feature resembling
a dip in the 400 TeV--1 PeV region and c) an excess in the $50-100$ TeV region.
(based on 1612.02834, "Boosted Dark Matter and its implications for the features in IceCube HESE data")
Primary author
Prof.
Rajesh Gandhi
(HRI)
