Probing Cosmic-Ray Accelerated Light Dark Matter with IceCube

Understand

The direct detection of particle dark matter through its scattering with nucleons is of fundamental importance to understand the nature of DM.

• In this work, we propose that the high-energy neutrino detectors like IceCube can be used to uniquely probe the DM-nucleon cross-section for high-energy DM of $\sim$ PeV, up-scattered by the high-energy cosmic rays.
• We derive for the first time strong constraints on the DM-nucleon cross-section down to $\sim 10^{-32}$ cm$^2$ at this energy scale for sub-GeV DM candidates.
• Such independent probe at energy scale far exceeding other existing direct detection experiments can therefore provide useful insights complementary to other searches.