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Published August 24, 2009 | Published
Book Section - Chapter Open

Dynamics of WIMPs in the Solar System and Implications for Direct and Indirect Detection

Abstract

Semi-analytic treatments of the evolution of orbits of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) in the solar system suggest that the WIMPs bound to the solar system may enhance the direct detection rate relative to that of the unbound population by up to a factor of order unity, and boost the flux of neutrinos from WIMP annihilation in the Earth by up to two orders of magnitude. To test these important but uncertain results, we perform a suite of numerical orbit integrations to explore the properties of the bound WIMP population as a function of the WIMP mass and the scattering cross section with baryonic matter. For regions of WIMP parameter space presently allowed by experiments, we find that (i) the bound WIMP population enhances the direct detection rate by at most ∼ 1% relative to the rate from unbound halo WIMPs; (ii) it is unlikely that planned km3-scale neutrino telescopes will detect neutrinos from WIMP annihilation in the Earth; (iii) the event rate from neutrinos produced by WIMP annihilation in the Sun may be much smaller than implied by the usual calculations, which assume that WIMPs scattered onto bound orbits are rapidly thermalized in the Sun.

Additional Information

© owned by the author(s) under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Licence. Published on: 2009 August 24. We thank A. Serenelli for providing the standard solar model in tabular form. We acknowledge financial support from NASA grants NNG04GL47G and NNX08AH24G. The simulations were run on computers at Princeton University supported by the Departments of Astrophysical Sciences (NSF AST-0216105) and Physics, and the TIGRESS High Performance Computing Center.

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