Neutrino signals from Dark Matter scatterings around blazars

by Dr Jacopo Nava (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)

Tuesday 10 Mar 2026, 13:00 → 14:00 Europe/Brussels

E/3rd floor-E.349 - Seminar room (E.349) (Marc de Hemptinne (chemin du Cyclotron, 2, Louvain-la-Neuve))

Neutrinos from blazars can originate from inelastic scatterings between the protons within their jets and sub-GeV dark matter (DM) around them. I will show how this mechanism can potentially account for both the IceCube detections of neutrinos from the blazar TXS 0506+056, which are otherwise challenging for astrophysical models of its jet, and also saturate the measured diffuse astrophysical neutrino flux at high energies. The same DM-proton interactions will also induce an upscattered DM flux, which could yield measurable nuclear recoil signals at neutrino detectors, such as Super-K, JUNO, and DUNE. I will show that searches for such DM components leave room for a variety of DM models to explain observations of IceCube high-energy neutrinos, and will provide future tests of this hypothesis

Zoom: https://cern.zoom.us/j/62591938215?pwd=qSqjURfb693pfZR7aFvYR2vJw3YnuD.1