Dark matter in the Solar System. II. WIMP annihilation rates in the Sun
- Creators
- Peter, Annika H. G.
Abstract
We calculate the annihilation rate of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) in the Sun as a function of their mass and elastic scattering cross section. One byproduct of the annihilation, muon neutrinos, may be observed by the next generation of neutrino telescopes. Previous estimates of the annihilation rate assumed that any WIMPs from the Galactic dark halo that are captured in the Sun by elastic scattering off solar nuclei quickly reach thermal equilibrium in the Sun. Using simulations of WIMP orbits in the Solar System in the case that spin-independent scattering dominates in the Sun (and extrapolating to the case when spin-dependent scattering dominates), we show that the optical depth of the Sun to WIMPs and the gravitational forces from planets both serve to decrease the annihilation rate below these estimates. While we find that the sensitivity of upcoming km^3-scale neutrino telescopes to ~100 GeV WIMPs is virtually unchanged from previous estimates, the sensitivity of these experiments to ~10 TeV WIMPs may be an order of magnitude less than the standard calculations would suggest. The new estimates of the annihilation rates should guide future experiment design and improve the mapping from neutrino event rates to WIMP parameter space.
Additional Information
© 2009 The American Physical Society. Received 9 February 2009; published 28 May 2009. This work grew out of a Ph.D thesis completed at Princeton University. We would like to thank Scott Tremaine for patient advising, keen insight, and comments on the draft. We thank A. Serenelli for providing me with the standard solar model in tabular form. We acknowledge financial support from NASA Grant Nos. NNG04GL47G and NNX08AH24G and from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. The simulations were performed using computing resources at Princeton University supported by the Department of Astrophysical Sciences (NSF AST-0216105), the Department of Physics, and the TIGRESS High Performance Computing Center. # 95.35.+d Dark matter (stellar, interstellar, galactic, and cosmological) # 26.65.+t Solar neutrinos in nuclear astrophysics # 95.85.Ry Neutrino, muon, pion, and other elementary particle astronomical observations; cosmic rays # 96.60.Vg Solar neutrinos in nuclear astrophysicsAttached Files
Published - Peter2009p4406Phys_Rev_D.pdf
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 15478
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20090831-092226175
- NASA
- NASA
- Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation
- AST-0216105
- NSF
- Created
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2009-09-08Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-08Created from EPrint's last_modified field