Solar Reflection of Dark Matter

Abstract

The scattering of light dark matter off thermal electrons inside the Sun produces a "fast" sub-component of the dark matter flux that may be detectable in underground experiments. We update and extend previous work by analyzing the signatures of dark matter candidates which scatter via light mediators. Using numerical simulations of the dark matter-electron interaction in the solar interior, we determine the energy spectrum of the reflected flux, and calculate the expected rates for direct detection experiments. We find that large Xenon-based experiments (such as XENON1T) provide the strongest direct limits for dark matter masses below a few MeV, reaching a sensitivity to the effective dark matter charge of better than $\sim 10^{-9}e$.

arXiv comment24 pages, 13 figures; direct detection limits corrected, limits become stronger; conclusions unchanged

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Cited by in corpus (6)

• A Next-Generation Liquid Xenon Observatory for Dark Matter and Neutrino Physics
• No room to hide: implications of cosmic-ray upscattering for GeV-scale dark matter
• Revisiting the Fermionic Dark Matter Absorption on Electron Target
• An Analytic Approach to Light Dark Matter Propagation
• Accelerated Light Dark Matter-Earth Inelastic Scattering in Direct Detection
• Atmospheric resonant production for light dark sectors