Novel Signatures of Matter-Induced Dark Matter Decay in Large-Volume Neutrino Telescopes

Abstract

Large-volume neutrino telescopes offer a unique opportunity to search for decaying dark matter through events containing a pair of energetic, highly non-collimated muon tracks emerging from a common vertex. Such events would have negligible Standard Model backgrounds and would constitute a striking signature of new physics. Conventional dark matter annihilation or decay, however, is too strongly constrained to produce an observable rate of such events. We therefore consider scenarios in which an excited dark matter state is extremely long-lived in vacuum but decays much more rapidly in the presence of ordinary matter. We present two realizations of this mechanism. In the first, a long-range scalar field sourced by ordinary matter modifies the dark-sector mass spectrum, kinematically opening the decay $χ_2 \rightarrow χ_1 Z'$ near the Earth while leaving it forbidden in vacuum. In the second, the scalar background induces kinetic mixing between a heavy $Z'$ and the photon, greatly enhancing the three-body decay $χ_2\toχ_1μ^+μ^-$ in matter-rich environments. We calculate the resulting distributions of muon energies and opening angles and show that viable regions of parameter space can yield observable event rates in IceCube, KM3NeT, and other large-volume neutrino telescopes while remaining consistent with existing constraints. We also briefly consider the sensitivity of IceCube to multi-muon events produced by the decays of cosmologically long-lived charged particles with masses $\gtrsim 1$ TeV.