A New Probe of Strongly-Interacting Dark Sector using Neutrino Telescopes

Abstract

A confining dark sector modeled after quantum chromodynamics provides a well-motivated framework for strongly-interacting dark matter. We show that dark vector mesons in a confining dark sector can be resonantly produced in high-energy neutrino scattering on the cosmic neutrino background, generating a distinctive absorption feature in the cosmic neutrino energy spectrum. Unlike conventional attenuation effects, this feature directly reflects the mass spectrum of dark resonances and can therefore serve as a spectroscopic signature of a strongly-interacting dark sector. We find that a broad range of dark-sector parameter space is within the reach of future neutrino telescopes, including IceCube-Gen2 Radio. Our proposal thus turns the cosmic neutrino background into a target for discovering dark-sector resonances, while simultaneously providing a novel probe of dark sector interactions with neutrinos.