2015/10/31 by C. Rott, Carsten Rott, Seongjin In +2 · 32 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Annihilation #Cherenkov radiation #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #Dark matter #Detector #Neutrino #Neutrino Physics Research #Neutrino detector #Neutrino oscillation #Nuclear physics #Particle physics #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #Physics #Pion #astro-ph.HE #hep-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/1475-7516/2015/11/039
published in Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics 2015(11), 039 (Institute of Physics) · 10 pages, 3 figures
openalex publication_date 2015/11/24 · arxiv created 2015/11/25 · arxiv updated 2015/11/26 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06
Dark matter can be gravitationally captured by the Sun after scattering off solar nuclei. Annihilations of the dark matter trapped and accumulated in the centre of the Sun could result in one of the most detectable and recognizable signals for dark matter. Searches for high-energy neutrinos produced in the decay of annihilation products have yielded extremely competitive constraints on the spin-dependent scattering cross sections of dark matter with nuclei. Recently, the low energy neutrino signal arising from dark-matter annihilation to quarks which then hadronize and shower has been suggested as a competitive and complementary search strategy. These high-multiplicity hadronic showers give rise to a large amount of pions which will come to rest in the Sun and decay, leading to a unique sub-GeV neutrino signal. We here improve on previous works by considering the monoenergetic neutrino signal arising from both pion and kaon decay. We consider searches at liquid scintillation, liquid argon, and water Cherenkov detectors and find very competitive sensitivities for few-GeV dark matter masses.