25 July 2007 to 1 August 2007
Karlsruhe University
Europe/Zurich timezone

Long lived staus in IceCube from atmospheric neutrinos

26 Jul 2007, 15:20
20m
Lehmann-Auditorium (Karlsruhe University)

Lehmann-Auditorium

Karlsruhe University

Wolfgang-Gaede-Str. 1 76131 Karlsruhe Germany
Parallel Talk Cosmology and Astrophysics Cosmology 1

Speaker

Dr Stefano Profumo (Caltech and UC Santa Cruz)

Description

The discovery of a long-lived charged particle at future colliders can point towards scenarios where the dark matter (DM) particle is superweakly interacting, and the next-to-lightest particle (NLP) is charged and quasi-stable. Such a situation is expected in several supersymmetric models, including gauge mediation and even minimal supergravity, where the DM particle is the gravitino and the charged NLP is the lightest stau. Probing the nature, and directly detecting the DM particle can be, in this case, extremely challenging. One, if not the only handle one would have is to detect with neutrino telescopes the charged NLP's produced in high energy neutrino collisions with nuclei. Previous studies focused on the production of staus from extra-galactic neutrinos, whose flux is, however, largely uncertain and has not been detected yet. In the present analysis, we study the production of charged NLP's from conventional atmospheric neutrinos and from neutrinos originating from the prompt decay of heavy quarks. We quantify and compare the resulting stau fluxes with what expected from extra-galactic neutrinos. We analyze the dependence of the stau flux on the underlying supersymmetric setup, and point out that even if the extra-galactic flux is very suppressed, prompt decay neutrinos can still provide a sufficient flux of staus at IceCube. We also comment on the flux of charged NLP's expected from proton-proton collisions, and show that it is typically subdominant, and always below detectable rates.

Author

Dr Stefano Profumo (Caltech and UC Santa Cruz)

Presentation materials