Boosted dark matter signals uplifted with self-interaction

Abstract

We explore detection prospects of a non-standard dark sector in the context of boosted dark matter. We focus on a scenario with two dark matter particles of a large mass difference, where the heavier candidate is secluded and interacts with the standard model particles only at loops, escaping existing direct and indirect detection bounds. Yet its pair annihilation in the galactic center or in the Sun may produce boosted stable particles, which could be detected as visible Cherenkov light in large volume neutrino detectors. In such models with multiple candidates, self-interaction of dark matter particles is naturally utilized in the {\it assisted freeze-out} mechanism and is corroborated by various cosmological studies such as N-body simulations of structure formation, observations of dwarf galaxies, and the small scale problem. We show that self-interaction of the secluded (heavier) dark matter greatly enhances the capture rate in the Sun and results in promising signals at current and future experiments. We perform a detailed analysis of the boosted dark matter events for Super-Kamiokande, Hyper-Kamiokande and PINGU, including notable effects such as evaporation due to self-interaction and energy loss in the Sun.

24 pages, 8 figures; discussion on the boosted DM flux from the Earth, references added, typos corrected; published in PLB

References in corpus (11)

• Big-Bang Nucleosynthesis
• Too big to fail? The puzzling darkness of massive Milky Way subhaloes
• Constraints on the Self-Interaction Cross-Section of Dark Matter from Numerical Simulations of the Merging Galaxy Cluster 1E 0657-5
• (In)direct Detection of Boosted Dark Matter
• Dark matter and a new gauge boson through kinetic mixing
• High-Energy Neutrinos From Dark Matter Particle Self-Capture Within the Sun
• Dark matter and sub-GeV hidden U(1) in GMSB models
• New Limits on Dark Matter from Super-Kamiokande
• Galactic 511 keV line from MeV millicharged dark matter
• Right-handed sneutrino dark matter in $\mathbf{U}(1{)}^{\prime }$ seesaw models and its signatures at the LHC
• Probing Dark Matter Self-Interaction in the Sun with IceCube-PINGU

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Boosted Dark Matter in IceCube and at the Galactic Center
• On the Direct Detection of Dark Matter Annihilation
• Monochromatic dark neutrinos and boosted dark matter in noble liquid direct detection
• Multi-component Dark Matter through a Radiative Higgs Portal
• Updated Constraints on Self-Interacting Dark Matter from Supernova 1987A
• Boosting (In)direct Detection of Dark Matter