Dark Matter Through the Neutrino Portal

Abstract

We consider a model of dark matter whose most prominent signature is a monochromatic flux of TeV neutrinos from the galactic center. As an example of a general scenario, we consider a specific model where the dark matter is a fermion in the adjoint representation of a hidden SU(N) gauge group that confines at GeV energies. The absence of light fermionic states in the dark sector ensures stability of dark matter on cosmological time scales. Dark matter couples to the standard model via the neutrino portal, that is, the singlet operator H L constructed from the Higgs and lepton doublets, which is the lowest dimensional fermionic singlet operator in the standard model. This coupling prompts dark matter decay where the dominant decay channel has one neutrino (and at least one dark glueball) in the final state. Other decay channels with charged standard model particles involve more particles in the final state and are therefore suppressed by phase space. In consequence, the standard indirect detection signals like gamma-ray photons, antiprotons and positrons are suppressed with respect to the neutrino signal. This coupling via the neutrino portal is most robustly constrained by Super-Kamiokande, which restricts the dark matter lifetime to be larger than 10^25 seconds. In the near future, the scenario will be probed by the new generation of neutrino telescopes. ANTARES will be sensitive to a dark matter lifetime of order 10^26 seconds, while IceCube/DeepCore can probe a lifetime as large as 10^27 seconds.