JUNO sensitivity to the annihilation of MeV dark matter in the galactic halo

Abstract

We discuss JUNO sensitivity to the annihilation of MeV dark matter in the galactic halo via detecting inverse beta decay reactions of electron anti-neutrinos resulting from the annihilation. We study possible backgrounds to the signature, including the reactor neutrinos, diffuse supernova neutrino background, charged- and neutral-current interactions of atmospheric neutrinos, backgrounds from muon-induced fast neutrons and cosmogenic isotopes. A fiducial volume cut, as well as the pulse shape discrimination and the muon veto are applied to suppress the above backgrounds. It is shown that JUNO sensitivity to the thermally averaged dark matter annihilation rate in 10 years of exposure would be significantly better than the present-day best limit set by Super-Kamiokande and would be comparable to that expected by Hyper-Kamiokande.

25 pages, 9 figures, matches the publised version

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Cited by in corpus (3)

• Probing the speed of scalar-induced gravitational waves with pulsar timing arrays
• Neutrino portals to MeV WIMPs with s-channel mediators
• Searching for MeV-mass neutrinophilic Dark Matter with Large Scale Dark Matter Detectors