Did IceCube detect Dark Matter around Blazars?

by Andrea Marchi (U. Bologna, DIFA)

Friday Apr 25, 2025, 12:30 PM → 2:30 PM America/Los_Angeles

48/2-224 - Madrone (SLAC)

Blazars - active galactic nuclei with relativistic jets pointed towards Earth - are ideal laboratories for studying sub-GeV Dark Matter phenomenology. The interaction of their powerful proton jets with the surrounding Dark Matter can give rise to two distinct signatures: on the one hand, the Dark Matter will be accelerated to high energies, making it potentially observable in neutrino experiments; on the other, the jet's protons will disintegrate in the collision, producing a flux of high energy neutrinos. These complementary signatures can shed light on the nature of Dark Matter and, intriguingly, the resulting neutrino flux can naturally account for the high-energy neutrino detected by IceCube from blazar TXS 0506+056, an observation that remains challenging to explain with astrophysical models alone.