High energy neutrinos from the Sun

Abstract

The Sun is a main source of high energy neutrinos. These neutrinos appear as secondary particles after the Sun absorbs high-energy cosmic rays, that find there a low-density environment (much thinner than our atmosphere) where most secondary pions, kaons and muons can decay before they lose energy. The main uncertainty in a calculation of the solar neutrino flux is due to the effects of the magnetic fields on the absorption rate of charged cosmic rays. We use recent data from HAWC on the cosmic-ray shadow of the Sun to estimate this rate. We evaluate the solar neutrino flux and show that at 1 TeV it is over ten times larger than the atmospheric one at zenith theta_z=30^o/150^o. The flux that we obtain has a distinct spectrum and flavor composition, and it could be detected in current and upcoming neutrino telescopes. KM3NeT, in particular, looks very promising: it will see the Sun high in the sky (the atmospheric background is lower there than near the horizon) and expects a very good angular resolution (the Sun's radius is just 0.27^o).

arXiv comment14 pages, version to appear in Astroparticle Physics

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Cited by in corpus (14)

• Constraints on Spin-Dependent Dark Matter Scattering with Long-Lived Mediators from TeV Observations of the Sun with HAWC
• Unexpected Dip in the Solar Gamma-Ray Spectrum
• Cosmic-ray interactions with the Sun using the FLUKA code
• nuSQuIDS: A toolbox for neutrino propagation
• The Sun at GeV--TeV Energies: A New Laboratory for Astroparticle Physics
• Dark matter capture by the Sun: revisiting velocity distribution uncertainties
• 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
• Searches for neutrinos from cosmic-ray interactions in the Sun using seven years of IceCube data
• The solar disk at high energies
• Matter effects on the flavor conversions of solar neutrinos and high-energy astrophysical neutrinos
• Neutrino Topology Reconstruction at DUNE and Applications to Searches for Dark Matter Annihilation in the Sun
• Simulating gamma-ray production from cosmic rays interacting with the solar atmosphere in the presence of coronal magnetic fields
• Search for solar atmospheric neutrinos with the ANTARES neutrino telescope