WIMP diffusion in the solar system including solar WIMP-nucleon scattering

Abstract

Dark matter in the form of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) can be captured by the Sun and the Earth, sink to their cores, annihilate and produce neutrinos that can be searched for with neutrino telescopes. The calculation of the capture rates of WIMPs in the Sun and especially the Earth are affected by large uncertainties coming mainly from effects of the planets in the Solar System, reducing the capture rates by up to an order of magnitude (or even more in some cases). We show that the WIMPs captured by weak scatterings in the Sun also constitute an important bound WIMP population in the Solar System. Taking this population and its interplay with the population bound through gravitational diffusion into account cancel the planetary effects on the capture rates, and the capture essentially proceeds as if the Sun and the Earth were free in the galactic halo. The neutrino signals from the Sun and the Earth are thus significantly higher than claimed in the scenarios with reduced capture rates.

6 pages, 3 figures, slightly extended, matches published version

References in corpus (4)

• Thin, thick and dark discs in LCDM
• Dark matter in the solar system I: The distribution function of WIMPs at the Earth from solar capture
• Dark matter in the solar system II: WIMP annihilation rates in the Sun
• Dark matter in the solar system III: The distribution function of WIMPs at the Earth from gravitational capture

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• Use of event-level neutrino telescope data in global fits for theories of new physics
• First search for dark matter annihilations in the Earth with the IceCube Detector
• Complementarity of direct and indirect Dark Matter detection experiments
• A tale of dark matter capture, sub-dominant WIMPs, and neutrino observatories
• Probing WIMP particle physics and astrophysics with direct detection and neutrino telescope data
• Dark Matter: A Brief Review
• Impact of cosmological and astrophysical constraints on dark matter simplified models
• Detecting Asymmetric Dark Matter in the Sun with Neutrinos
• WIMP capture and annihilation in the Earth in effective theories
• Impact of nucleon matrix element uncertainties on the interpretation of direct and indirect dark matter search results
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• Numerical Simulations of the Dark Universe: State of the Art and the Next Decade
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