LPPC Seminars: Scatterings of dark matter and relic neutrinos off cosmic rays near black holes

Scatterings of dark matter and relic neutrinos off cosmic rays near black holes (02/21/2024)

Speaker: Gonzalo H. Moreno (Virginia Tech)
Some supermassive black holes at the center of galaxies may accelerate cosmic rays to very high energies, producing high-energy neutrinos and gamma-rays observable on Earth. The dark matter in the vicinity of supermassive black holes may scatter off protons, electrons, neutrinos and photons, perhaps cooling them too fast. Furthermore, a fraction of the dark matter and the cosmic neutrino background in these environments may be boosted to larger energies via scatterings with cosmic rays, yielding a flux directly detectable at Earth-based experiments. I will discuss all these phenomenological signatures in some detail, showing that they allow to probe new regions of the parameter space of particle dark matter and relic neutrino overdensity.