A combined astrophysical and dark matter interpretation of the IceCube HESE and throughgoing muon events

Abstract

We perform a combined likelihood analysis for the IceCube 6-year high-energy starting events (HESE) above 60 TeV and 8-year throughgoing muon events above 10 TeV using a two-component neutrino flux model. The two-component flux can be motivated either from purely astrophysical sources or due to a beyond Standard Model contribution, such as decaying heavy dark matter. As for the astrophysical neutrinos, we consider two different source flavor compositions corresponding to the standard pion decay and muon-damped pion decay sources. We find that the latter is slightly preferred over the former as the high-energy component, while the low-energy component does not show any such preference. We also take into account the multi-messenger gamma-ray constraints and find that our two-component fit is compatible with these constraints, whereas the single-component power-law bestfit to the HESE data is ruled out. The astrophysical plus dark matter interpretation of the two-component flux is found to be mildly preferred by the current data and the gamma-ray constraints over the purely astrophysical explanation.