The distribution of inelastic dark matter in the Sun

Abstract

If dark matter is composed of new particles, these may become captured after scattering with nuclei in the Sun, thermalise through additional scattering, and finally annihilate into neutrinos that can be detected on Earth. If dark matter scatters inelastically into a slightly heavier ($\mathcal{O}(10-100)$ keV) state it is unclear whether thermalisation occurs. One issue is that up-scattering from the lower mass state may be kinematically forbidden, at which point the thermalisation process effectively stops. A larger evaporation rate is also expected due to down-scattering. In this work, we perform a numerical simulation of the capture and thermalisation process in order to study the evolution of the dark matter distribution. We then calculate and compare the annihilation rate with that of the often assumed Maxwell--Boltzmann distribution. We also check if equilibrium between capture and annihilation is reached and find that this assumption definitely breaks down in a part of the explored parameter space. We also find that evaporation induced by down-scattering is not effective in reducing the total dark matter abundance.

28 pages, 10 figures. v3: Errata: Bug fixed with some important changes to the conclusions

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Cited by in corpus (11)

• Heating up Neutron Stars with Inelastic Dark Matter
• Evaporation of dark matter from celestial bodies
• Search for dark matter signatures in the gamma-ray emission towards the Sun with the Fermi Large Area Telescope
• Testing Theories of Gravity with Planetary Ephemerides
• A search for dark matter cosmic-ray electrons and positrons from the Sun with the Fermi Large Area Telescope
• Constraints on Dark Matter from the Moon
• New constraints on inelastic dark matter from IceCube
• The leptophilic dark matter in the Sun: the minimum testable mass
• Halo-independent bounds on Inelastic Dark Matter
• Assessing the sensitivity of PINGU to effective dark matter-nucleon interactions
• Sensitivity of WIMP bounds on the velocity distribution in the limit of a massless mediator