Galactic Center Neutrinos from Cosmic Ray–Dark Matter Interactions

J. Terol Calvo, P. de la Torre Luque, M. Mukhopadhyay, C. Cappiello and G. Herrera

Submitted to Physical Review D, under review (2026)

arXiv:2607.05335

What it is about

If dark matter interacts with ordinary matter at all, then the cosmic rays propagating through the Galaxy are already colliding with it. Above a certain momentum transfer the proton breaks apart, producing a shower of Standard Model particles, neutrinos among them. Here we compute that neutrino flux from the Galactic Centre for the first time with a realistic treatment of the collision and the hadronisation, then recast public ANTARES data to test for it. No signal is found, which gives some of the strongest limits available on dark matter between a keV and a GeV.

Exclusion on the elastic dark matter–proton cross section against dark matter mass, for mediator masses of 100 MeV (orange) and 5 GeV (red). Solid curves are the limits recast from ANTARES; dotted and dashed show the reach of IceCube, IceCube-Gen2 and KM3NeT. Shaded regions are existing constraints.
Exclusion on the elastic dark matter–proton cross section against dark matter mass, for mediator masses of 100 MeV (orange) and 5 GeV (red). Solid curves are the limits recast from ANTARES; dotted and dashed show the reach of IceCube, IceCube-Gen2 and KM3NeT. Shaded regions are existing constraints.

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