Constraints on the dark matter annihilations by neutrinos with substructure effects included

Abstract

Dark matter (DM) annihilations in the Galaxy may produce high-energy neutrinos, which can be detected by the neutrino telescopes, for example, IceCube, ANTARES, and Super-Kamiokande. The neutrinos can also arise from hadronic interaction between cosmic rays and the atmosphere around the Earth, known as atmospheric neutrino. Current measurements on neutrino flux are consistent with theoretical prediction of atmospheric neutrino within the uncertainties. In this paper, by requiring that the DM annihilation neutrino flux is less than the current measurements, we obtain an upper bound on the cross section of dark matter annihilation $⟨\ensuremath{\sigma}v⟩$. Compared with previous investigations, we improve the bound by including DM substructure contributions. In our paper, two kinds of substructure effects are scrutinized. One is the substructure average contribution over all directions. The other is the point source effect by a single massive subhalo. We found that the former can improve the bound by several times, while the latter can improve the bound by ${10}^{1}\ensuremath{\sim}{10}^{4}$ utilizing the excellent angular resolution of the neutrino telescope IceCube. The exact improvement depends on the DM profile and the subhalo concentration model. In some models, IceCube can achieve the sensitivity of $⟨\ensuremath{\sigma}v⟩\ensuremath{\sim}{10}^{\ensuremath{-}26}\text{ }\text{ }{\mathrm{cm}}^{3}\text{ }{\mathrm{s}}^{\ensuremath{-}1}$.