Probing Cosmic-Ray Accelerated Light Dark Matter with IceCube
Abstract
The direct detection of particle dark matter through its scattering with nucleons is of fundamental importance to understand the nature of DM. In this work, we propose that the high-energy neutrino detectors like IceCube can be used to uniquely probe the DM-nucleon cross-section for high-energy DM of PeV, up-scattered by the high-energy cosmic rays. We derive for the first time strong constraints on the DM-nucleon cross-section down to 10-32 cm2 at this energy scale for sub-GeV DM candidates. Such independent probe at energy scale far exceeding other existing direct detection experiments can therefore provide useful insights complementary to other searches.
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