Constraining dark matter-nucleon scattering cross section by the background electron anti-neutrino flux data

Abstract

Celestial objects such as stars and planets might be able to capture a large amount of dark matter particles through dark matter-nucleon scattering. Many previous studies have considered different celestial objects such as the Sun and the Earth as natural dark matter detectors and obtained some stringent bounds of the dark matter-nucleon scattering cross section. In this study, we use the $\sim 10$ MeV electron neutrino flux limits obtained by the Super-Kamiokande experiment and consider the Earth as a large natural dark matter detector to constrain the dark matter-nucleon scattering cross section. We show that this method can generally get more stringent limits. For certain ranges of dark matter mass annihilating via the $b\bar{b}$ channel, the limits of cross section for the isospin-independent scattering and proton-only scattering could be more stringent than that obtained in the PICO direct-detection experiment.

Accepted for publication in Physics Letters B

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