Reconciling neutrino flux from heavy dark matter decay and recent events at IceCube

Understand

The IceCube detector has recently reported the observation of 28 events at previously unexplored energies.

• While the statistics of the observed events are still low, these events hint at the existence of a neutrino flux over and above the atmospheric neutrino background.
• We investigate the possibility that a significant component of the additional neutrino flux originates due to the decay of a very heavy dark matter (VHDM) particle via several possible channels into standard model particles.
• We show that a combination of a power law astrophysical neutrino spectrum and the neutrino flux from the decay of a DM species of mass in the range $150-400$ TeV improves the fit to the observed neutrino events than that obtained from a best-fit astrophysical flux alone.