English

Boosted dark matter signals uplifted with self-interaction

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2015-06-23 v2 High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena High Energy Physics - Experiment

Abstract

We explore detection prospects of a non-standard dark sector in the context of boosted dark matter. We focus on a scenario with two dark matter particles of a large mass difference, where the heavier candidate is secluded and interacts with the standard model particles only at loops, escaping existing direct and indirect detection bounds. Yet its pair annihilation in the galactic center or in the Sun may produce boosted stable particles, which could be detected as visible Cherenkov light in large volume neutrino detectors. In such models with multiple candidates, self-interaction of dark matter particles is naturally utilized in the {\it assisted freeze-out} mechanism and is corroborated by various cosmological studies such as N-body simulations of structure formation, observations of dwarf galaxies, and the small scale problem. We show that self-interaction of the secluded (heavier) dark matter greatly enhances the capture rate in the Sun and results in promising signals at current and future experiments. We perform a detailed analysis of the boosted dark matter events for Super-Kamiokande, Hyper-Kamiokande and PINGU, including notable effects such as evaporation due to self-interaction and energy loss in the Sun.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1411.6632,
  title  = {Boosted dark matter signals uplifted with self-interaction},
  author = {Kyoungchul Kong and Gopolang Mohlabeng and Jong-Chul Park},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1411.6632},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

24 pages, 8 figures; discussion on the boosted DM flux from the Earth, references added, typos corrected; published in PLB

R2 v1 2026-06-22T07:10:36.605Z