2008/08/19 by Dan Hooper, Frank Petriello, Kathryn M. Zurek +1 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysics #Astrophysics and Cosmic Phenomena #Cosmology #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #Dark matter #Electron #Lepton #Light dark matter #Massive particle #Neutrino #Nuclear physics #Particle physics #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #Physics #Scalar field dark matter #WIMP #Weakly interacting massive particles #hep-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.79.015010
published as Phys.Rev.D79:015010,2009 · 13 pages, 7 figures
arxiv created 2008/08/19 · openalex publication_date 2009/01/22 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Recently, the DAMA/LIBRA Collaboration has repeated and reinforced their claim to have detected an annual modulation in their signal rate, and have interpreted this observation as evidence for dark-matter particles at the 8.2\ensuremathσ confidence level. Furthermore, it has also been noted that the effects of channeling may enable a weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP) that scatters elastically via spin-independent interactions from nuclei to produce the signal observed by DAMA/LIBRA without exceeding the limits placed by CDMS, XENON, CRESST, CoGeNT, and other direct-detection experiments. To accommodate this elastic-scattering explanation, however, the mass of the responsible dark-matter particle must be relatively light, mDM\ensuremath\lesssim10 GeV. Such dark-matter particles will become captured by and annihilate in the Sun at very high rates, leading to a potentially large flux of GeV-scale neutrinos. We calculate the neutrino spectrum resulting from WIMP annihilations in the Sun and show that existing limits from Super-Kamiokande can be used to close a significant portion of the DAMA region, especially if the dark-matter particles produce tau leptons or neutrinos in a sizable fraction of their annihilations. We also determine the spin-dependent WIMP-nuclei elastic-scattering parameter space consistent with DAMA. The constraints from Super-Kamiokande on the spin-dependent scenario are even more severe---they exclude any self-annihilating WIMP in the DAMA region that annihilates 1% of the time or more to any combination of neutrinos, tau leptons, or charm or bottom quarks.