3 research outputs found
Probing new physics with long-lived charged particles produced by atmospheric and astrophysical neutrinos
As suggested by some extensions of the Standard Model of particle physics,
dark matter may be a super-weakly interacting lightest stable particle, while
the next-to-lightest particle (NLP) is charged and meta-stable. One could test
such a possibility with neutrino telescopes, by detecting the charged NLPs
produced in high-energy neutrino collisions with Earth matter. We study the
production of charged NLPs by both atmospheric and astrophysical neutrinos;
only the latter, which is largely uncertain and has not been detected yet, was
the focus of previous studies. We compute the resulting fluxes of the charged
NLPs, compare those of different origins, and analyze the dependence on the
underlying particle physics setup. We point out that even if the astrophysical
neutrino flux is very small, atmospheric neutrinos, especially those from the
prompt decay of charmed mesons, may provide a detectable flux of NLP pairs at
neutrino telescopes such as IceCube. We also comment on the flux of charged
NLPs expected from proton-nucleon collisions, and show that, for theoretically
motivated and phenomenologically viable models, it is typically sub-dominant
and below detectable rates.Comment: 27 pages, 6 figures; accepted for publication in JCA
Spin-independent interferences and spin-dependent interactions with scalar dark matter
Gamma-Rays from Decaying Dark Matter.
We study the prospects for detecting gamma-rays from decaying Dark Matter
(DM), focusing in particular on gravitino DM in R-parity breaking vacua. Given
the substantially different angular distribution of the predicted gamma-ray
signal with respect to the case of annihilating DM, and the relatively poor (of
order 0.1) angular resolution of gamma-ray detectors, the best strategy
for detection is in this case to look for an exotic contribution to the
gamma-ray flux at high galactic latitudes, where the decaying DM contribution
would resemble an astrophysical extra-galactic component, similar to the one
inferred by EGRET observations. Upcoming experiments such as GLAST and AMS-02
may identify this exotic contribution and discriminate it from astrophysical
sources, or place significant constraints on the mass and lifetime of DM
particles.Comment: 15 pages, 5 figures, LaTeX with iopart.cls. Minor changes, typos
corrected and references added/updated. Version accepted for publication in
JCA