Cosmic ray-boosted dark matter at IceCube

Cosmic ray (CR) upscattering of dark matter is considered as one of the most straightforward mechanisms to accelerate ambient dark matter, making it detectable at high threshold, large volume experiments. In this work, we revisit CR upscattered dark matter signals at the IceCube detector, focusing on lower energy data than was considered before. We consider both scattering with electrons and nuclei. In the latter, we include both elastic and deep-inelastic scattering computations. As concrete examples, we consider two benchmark models; fermion dark matter with vector and scalar mediators. We compare our model projections with the most current constraints and show that the IceCube detector can detect CR-boosted dark matter especially with masses below <a:math xmlns:a="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><a:mo>∼</a:mo><a:mn>100</a:mn><a:mtext> </a:mtext><a:mtext> </a:mtext><a:mi>keV</a:mi></a:math> when scattering with electrons and <c:math xmlns:c="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><c:mo>∼</c:mo><c:mi>MeV</c:mi></c:math> in the nucleon scattering case. Published by the American Physical Society 2024