High Energy Neutrinos, Gravitational Waves, and Dark Matter from a Cosmological First Order Phase Transition
Abstract
We investigate high energy neutrinos (HEνs) from the decay of superheavy dark matter (DM) produced during a cosmological first order phase transition. Adopting the filtered DM production mechanism, we revisit the relic abundance calculation by incorporating recent progress in determining the bubble wall velocity from hydrodynamics. We show that DM with mass mDM≃ 4.4×108 GeV can reproduce the observed relic abundance and accommodate ultra high energy neutrino events such as KM3-230213A, while the same phase transition simultaneously generates a stochastic gravitational wave (GW) background. Although the GW signal (which peaks at 104 Hz) is not yet observable in this example, at lower DM masses mDM ≲106 GeV, the neutrino spectrum shifts into the energy range relevant for IceCube observations, while the associated GW signal moves to lower frequencies and can reach the projected sensitivities of Cosmic Explorer, BBO, and DECIGO. This gives a multimessenger connection between HEνs and GWs, with both signals connected to DM production in a first order phase transition.
Related
- Searches for coincident Gravitational Waves and High-Energy Neutrinos from the KM3NeT and ANTARES telescopes during O3
- IceCube Real-time Searches for High-energy Neutrinos Coincident with LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA Gravitational-Wave Alerts in O4a
- Cosmological and High-Energy Physics Implications from Gravitational-Wave Background Searches in LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA’s O1–O4a Runs
- Cosmological constraints on the interacting viscous dark matter and decaying vacuum energy models
- Cosmological Constraints on Interacting Scalar-Field Dark Matter and Early Dark Energy mediated by a Kinetic Kernel
BibTeX
@misc{cline2026high,
title = {{High Energy Neutrinos, Gravitational Waves, and Dark Matter from a Cosmological First Order Phase Transition}},
author = {James M. Cline and Savas Stoica and Yong Xu},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.02420},
eprint = {2610.02420},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.02420},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - High Energy Neutrinos, Gravitational Waves, and Dark Matter from a Cosmological First Order Phase Transition
AU - James M. Cline
AU - Savas Stoica
AU - Yong Xu
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/01
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.02420
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.02420
AB - We investigate high energy neutrinos (HEνs) from the decay of superheavy dark matter (DM) produced during a cosmological first order phase transition. Adopting the filtered DM production mechanism, we revisit the relic abundance calculation by incorporating recent progress in determining the bubble wall velocity from hydrodynamics. We show that DM with mass m_DM≃ 4.4×10^8 GeV can reproduce the observed relic abundance and accommodate ultra high energy neutrino events such as KM3-230213A, while the same phase transition simultaneously generates a stochastic gravitational wave (GW) background. Although the GW signal (which peaks at 10^4 Hz) is not yet observable in this example, at lower DM masses m_DM ≲10^6 GeV, the neutrino spectrum shifts into the energy range relevant for IceCube observations, while the associated GW signal moves to lower frequencies and can reach the projected sensitivities of Cosmic Explorer, BBO, and DECIGO. This gives a multimessenger connection between HEνs and GWs, with both signals connected to DM production in a first order phase transition.
ER -