Probing Dark Matter Self-Interaction in the Sun with IceCube-PINGU

Abstract

We study the capture, annihilation and evaporation of dark matter (DM) inside the Sun. It has been shown that the DM self-interaction can increase the DM number inside the Sun. We demonstrate that this enhancement becomes more significant in the regime of small DM mass, given a fixed DM self-interaction cross section. This leads to the enhancement of neutrino flux from DM annihilation. On the other hand, for DM mass as low as a few GeVs, not only the DM-nuclei scatterings can cause the DM evaporation, DM self-interaction also provides non-negligible contributions to this effect. Consequently, the critical mass for DM evaporation (typically 3 $\sim$ 4 GeV without the DM self-interaction) can be slightly increased. We discuss the prospect of detecting DM self-interaction in IceCube-PINGU using the annihilation channels $\chi \chi \to {\tau }^{+}{\tau }^{-},\nu \bar{\nu }$ as examples. The PINGU sensitivities to DM self-interaction cross section ${\sigma }_{\chi \chi }$ are estimated for track and cascade events.

20 pages, 24 Figures; matches the published version

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• Constraints on the Self-Interaction Cross-Section of Dark Matter from Numerical Simulations of the Merging Galaxy Cluster 1E 0657-5
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• High-Energy Neutrinos From Dark Matter Particle Self-Capture Within the Sun
• Measurement of the Atmospheric ${\nu }_e$ flux in IceCube
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Cited by in corpus (5)

• Boosted dark matter signals uplifted with self-interaction
• On the Direct Detection of Dark Matter Annihilation
• Updated Constraints on Self-Interacting Dark Matter from Supernova 1987A
• WIMP capture by the Sun in the effective theory of dark matter self-interactions
• On the Role of Neutrinos Telescopes in the Search for Dark Matter Annihilations in the Sun