Prospects for indirect detection of sneutrino dark matter with IceCube Academic Article uri icon

abstract

  • We investigate the prospects for indirect detection of right-handed sneutrino dark matter at the IceCube neutrino telescope in a U(1)B-L extension of the minimal supersymmetric standard model. The capture and annihilation of sneutrinos inside the Sun reach equilibrium, and the flux of produced neutrinos is governed by the sneutrino-proton elastic scattering cross section, which has an upper bound of 810-9pb from the Z mass limits in the B-L model. Despite the absence of any spin-dependent contribution, the muon event rates predicted by this model can be detected at IceCube since sneutrinos mainly annihilate into leptonic final states by virtue of the fermion B-L charges. These subsequently decay to neutrinos with 100% efficiency. The Earth muon event rates are too small to be detected for the standard halo model irrespective of an enhanced sneutrino annihilation cross section that can explain the recent PAMELA data. For modified velocity distributions, the Earth muon events increase substantially and can be greater than the IceCube detection threshold of 12 events km-2yr-1. However, this only leads to a mild increase of about 30% for the Sun muon events. The number of muon events from the Sun can be as large as roughly 100 events km-2yr-1 for this model. 2009 The American Physical Society.

published proceedings

  • PHYSICAL REVIEW D

author list (cited authors)

  • Allahverdi, R., Bornhauser, S., Dutta, B., & Richardson-McDaniel, K.

citation count

  • 26

publication date

  • September 2009