Probing the stability of superheavy dark matter particles with high-energy neutrinos

Full text: There is currently mounting evidence for the existence of dark matter in our Universe from various astrophysical and cosmological observations, but the two of the most fundamental properties of the dark matter particle, the mass and the lifetime, are only weakly constrained by the astronomical and cosmological evidence of dark matter. We derive lower limits on the lifetime of dark matter particles with masses in the range 10 TeV - 1018 GeV from the non-observation of ultrahigh energy neutrinos in the AMANDA, IceCube, Auger and ANITA experiments. All these experiments probe different energy windows and perfectly complement each other. For dark matter particles which produce neutrinos in a two body or a three body decay, we find that the dark matter lifetime must be longer than ∼ 1026 s for masses between 10 TeV and the Grand Unification scale. We will consider various scenarios where the decay of the dark matter particle produces high energy neutrinos. Neutrinos travel in the Universe without suffering an appreciable attenuation, even for EeV neutrinos, in contrast to photons which rapidly lose their energy via pair production. This remarkable property makes neutrinos a very suitable messenger to constrain the lifetime of superheavy dark matter particles. Finally, we also calculate, for concrete particle physics scenarios, the limits on the strength of the interactions that induce the dark matter decay. (author)