Neutrinos from cosmic ray interactions in the Sun

Abstract

Cosmic rays hitting the solar atmosphere generate neutrinos that interact and oscillate in the Sun and oscillate on the way to Earth. These neutrinos could potentially be detected with neutrino telescopes and will be a background for searches for neutrinos from dark matter annihilation in the Sun. We calculate the flux of neutrinos from these cosmic ray interactions in the Sun and also investigate the interactions near a detector on Earth that give rise to muons. We compare this background with both regular Earth-atmospheric neutrinos and signals from dark matter annihilation in the Sun. Our calculation is performed with an event-based Monte Carlo approach that should be suitable as a simulation tool for experimental collaborations. Our program package is released publicly along with this paper.

arXiv comment30 pages, 15 figures, matches published version

References in corpus (27)

• PYTHIA 6.4 Physics and Manual
• PYTHIA 6.2 Physics and Manual
• DarkSUSY: Computing Supersymmetric Dark Matter Properties Numerically
• Updated fit to three neutrino mixing: exploring the accelerator-reactor complementarity
• First Year Performance of The IceCube Neutrino Telescope
• New Solar Composition: The Problem With Solar Models Revisited
• Spectrum of cosmic-ray nucleons and the atmospheric muon charge ratio
• The Sun's Global Photospheric and Coronal Magnetic Fields: Observations and Models
• Search for annihilating dark matter in the Sun with 3 years of IceCube data
• The Magnetic Field in the Solar Atmosphere
• CTEQ6 Parton Distributions with Heavy Quark Mass Effects
• Neutrinos from WIMP Annihilations Obtained Using a Full Three-Flavor Monte Carlo Approach
• Improved limits on dark matter annihilation in the Sun with the 79-string IceCube detector and implications for supersymmetry
• Fermi-LAT Observations of Two Gamma-Ray Emission Components from the Quiescent Sun
• Perturbative charm production and the prompt atmospheric neutrino flux in light of RHIC and LHC
• Prompt atmospheric neutrino fluxes: perturbative QCD models and nuclear effects
• Lepton fluxes from atmospheric charm revisited
• High Energy Neutrino Production by Cosmic Ray Interactions in the Sun
• Limits on the WIMP-nucleon scattering cross-section from neutrino telescopes
• Solar Atmospheric Neutrinos: A New Neutrino Floor for Dark Matter Searches
• The prompt atmospheric neutrino flux in the light of LHCb
• First Observation of Time Variation in the Solar-Disk Gamma-Ray Flux with Fermi
• Solar Atmospheric Neutrinos and the Sensitivity Floor for Solar Dark Matter Annihilation Searches
• Oscillations of solar atmosphere neutrinos
• The sun as a high energy neutrino source
• A new version of the event generator Sibyll
• Charm production in SIBYLL

Cited by in corpus (45)

• Grand Unified Neutrino Spectrum at Earth: Sources and Spectral Components
• The hadronic interaction model Sibyll-2.3c and inclusive lepton fluxes
• Powerful Solar Signatures of Long-Lived Dark Mediators
• White Paper on New Opportunities at the Next-Generation Neutrino Experiments (Part 1: BSM Neutrino Physics and Dark Matter)
• Solar Atmospheric Neutrinos: A New Neutrino Floor for Dark Matter Searches
• Wolfenstein potentials for neutrinos induced by ultra-light mediators
• Probing Particle Physics with IceCube
• Constraints on Spin-Dependent Dark Matter Scattering with Long-Lived Mediators from TeV Observations of the Sun with HAWC
• Search for GeV-scale Dark Matter Annihilation in the Sun with IceCube DeepCore
• Solar Atmospheric Neutrinos and the Sensitivity Floor for Solar Dark Matter Annihilation Searches
• Evidence for a New Component of High-Energy Solar Gamma-Ray Production
• Unexpected Dip in the Solar Gamma-Ray Spectrum
• TeV Solar Gamma Rays From Cosmic-Ray Interactions
• Neutrino decoherence from quantum gravitational stochastic perturbations
• Cosmic-ray interactions with the Sun using the FLUKA code
• The Southern Wide-Field Gamma-Ray Observatory (SWGO): A Next-Generation Ground-Based Survey Instrument for VHE Gamma-Ray Astronomy
• First HAWC Observations of the Sun Constrain Steady TeV Gamma-Ray Emission
• The TeV Sun Rises: Discovery of Gamma rays from the Quiescent Sun with HAWC
• A search for dark matter cosmic-ray electrons and positrons from the Sun with the Fermi Large Area Telescope
• High energy neutrinos from the Sun
• Solar neutrino physics
• The Sun at GeV--TeV Energies: A New Laboratory for Astroparticle Physics
• $\chi$aro$\nu$: a tool for neutrino flux generation from WIMPs
• Measurements of the Time-Dependent Cosmic-Ray Sun Shadow with Seven Years of IceCube Data -- Comparison with the Solar Cycle and Magnetic Field Models
• Dark matter capture by the Sun: revisiting velocity distribution uncertainties
• Cosmic-ray propagation around the Sun: investigating the influence of the solar magnetic field on the cosmic-ray Sun shadow
• The Sun at TeV energies: gammas, neutrons, neutrinos and a cosmic ray shadow
• Search for GeV Neutrino Emission During Intense Gamma-Ray Solar Flares with the IceCube Neutrino Observatory
• A Solar System Test of Self-Interacting Dark Matter
• On the Role of Neutrinos Telescopes in the Search for Dark Matter Annihilations in the Sun
• The solar disk at high energies
• Searches for neutrinos from cosmic-ray interactions in the Sun using seven years of IceCube data
• Effect of polarisation and choice of event generator on spectra from dark matter annihilations
• Matter effects on the flavor conversions of solar neutrinos and high-energy astrophysical neutrinos
• Prospects of Indirect Searches for Dark Matter at INO
• Neutrino Topology Reconstruction at DUNE and Applications to Searches for Dark Matter Annihilation in the Sun
• Neutrinos from the Sun can discover dark matter-electron scattering
• Tau neutrinos from ultracompact dark matter minihalos and constraints on the primordial curvature perturbations
• Non-standard interactions and neutrinos from dark matter annihilation in the Sun
• New constraints on radiative seesaw models from IceCube and other neutrino detectors
• Simulating gamma-ray production from cosmic rays interacting with the solar atmosphere in the presence of coronal magnetic fields
• Super-Kamiokande Strongly Constrains Leptophilic Dark Matter Capture in the Sun
• Neutrinos from captured dark matter in galactic stars
• Searching for Dark Matter in the Sun using Hyper-Kamiokande
• Search for solar atmospheric neutrinos with the ANTARES neutrino telescope