2008/06/30 by Peng‐Fei Yin, Peng-fei Yin, Jia Liu +4
Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysics and Cosmic Phenomena #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #astro-ph #hep-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.78.065027
published as Phys.Rev.D78:065027,2008 · 19 pages, 5 figures, 1 table
openalex publication_date 2008/09/15 · arxiv created 2008/09/28 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Dark matter (DM) annihilations in the Galaxy may produce high-energy neutrinos, which can be detected by the neutrino telescopes, for example, IceCube, ANTARES, and Super-Kamiokande. The neutrinos can also arise from hadronic interaction between cosmic rays and the atmosphere around the Earth, known as atmospheric neutrino. Current measurements on neutrino flux are consistent with theoretical prediction of atmospheric neutrino within the uncertainties. In this paper, by requiring that the DM annihilation neutrino flux is less than the current measurements, we obtain an upper bound on the cross section of dark matter annihilation ⟨\ensuremathσv⟩. Compared with previous investigations, we improve the bound by including DM substructure contributions. In our paper, two kinds of substructure effects are scrutinized. One is the substructure average contribution over all directions. The other is the point source effect by a single massive subhalo. We found that the former can improve the bound by several times, while the latter can improve the bound by 101\ensuremath∼104 utilizing the excellent angular resolution of the neutrino telescope IceCube. The exact improvement depends on the DM profile and the subhalo concentration model. In some models, IceCube can achieve the sensitivity of ⟨\ensuremathσv⟩\ensuremath∼10^\ensuremath-26 cm3 s^\ensuremath-1.