Probing the Dark Matter mass and nature with neutrinos

Abstract

We study the possible indirect neutrino signal from dark matter annihilations inside the solar interior for relatively light dark matter masses in the O(10) GeV range. Due to their excellent energy reconstruction capabilities, we focus on the detection of this flux in liquid argon or magnetized iron calorimeter detectors, proposed for the next generation of far detectors of neutrino oscillation experiments and neutrino telescopes. The aim of the study is to probe the ability of these detectors to determine fundamental properties of the dark matter nature such as its mass or its relative annihilation branching fractions to different channels. We find that these detectors will be able to accurately measure the dark matter mass as long as the dark matter annihilations have a significant branching into the neutrino or at least the tau channel. We have also discovered degeneracies between different dark matter masses and annihilation channels, where a hard tau channel spectrum for a lower dark matter mass may mimic that of a softer quark channel spectrum for a larger dark matter mass. Finally, we discuss the sensitivity of the detectors to the different branching ratios and find that it is between one and two orders of magnitude better than the current bounds from those coming from analysis of Super-Kamiokande data.

REVTeX4, 21 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (16)

• Observation of a new particle in the search for the Standard Model Higgs boson with the ATLAS detector at the LHC
• Observation of a new boson at a mass of 125 GeV with the CMS experiment at the LHC
• PYTHIA 6.4 Physics and Manual
• Global analysis of neutrino masses, mixings and phases: entering the era of leptonic CP violation searches
• New features in the simulation of neutrino oscillation experiments with GLoBES 3.0
• First dark matter search results from a 4-kg CF${}_3$I bubble chamber operated in a deep underground site
• Search for dark matter annihilations in the Sun with the 79-string IceCube detector
• Improvement of low energy atmospheric neutrino flux calculation using the JAM nuclear interaction model
• Neutrinos from WIMP Annihilations Obtained Using a Full Three-Flavor Monte Carlo Approach
• New Limits on Dark Matter from Super-Kamiokande
• High energy neutrinos from neutralino annihilations in the Sun
• Neutrino flavor ratios as diagnostic of solar WIMP annihilation
• Reconstructing WIMP properties with neutrino detectors
• Sensitivity of IceCube-DeepCore to neutralino dark matter in the MSSM-25
• A novel method to extract dark matter parameters from neutrino telescope data
• The Golden Channel at a Neutrino Factory revisited: improved sensitivities from a Magnetised Iron Neutrino Detector

Cited by in corpus (11)

• Dark matter in the Sun: scattering off electrons vs nucleons
• The Dark Side of the Littlest Seesaw: freeze-in, the two right-handed neutrino portal and leptogenesis-friendly fimpzillas
• Interplay between neutrino and gravity portals for FIMP dark matter
• Minimal Seesaw extension for Neutrino Mass and Mixing, Leptogenesis and Dark Matter: FIMPzillas through the Right-Handed Neutrino Portal
• Minimal self-interacting dark matter models with light mediator
• $\chi$aro$\nu$: a tool for neutrino flux generation from WIMPs
• Dark Matter in the Type Ib Seesaw Model
• Dark side of the Seesaw
• Prospects of Indirect Searches for Dark Matter at INO
• Tau neutrinos from ultracompact dark matter minihalos and constraints on the primordial curvature perturbations
• Indirect searches of Galactic diffuse dark matter in INO-MagICAL detector