English

Probing Dark Matter Self-Interaction in the Sun with IceCube-PINGU

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2015-06-22 v3 High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena

Abstract

We study the capture, annihilation and evaporation of dark matter (DM) inside the Sun. It has been shown that the DM self-interaction can increase the DM number inside the Sun. We demonstrate that this enhancement becomes more significant in the regime of small DM mass, given a fixed DM self-interaction cross section. This leads to the enhancement of neutrino flux from DM annihilation. On the other hand, for DM mass as low as a few GeVs, not only the DM-nuclei scatterings can cause the DM evaporation, DM self-interaction also provides non-negligible contributions to this effect. Consequently, the critical mass for DM evaporation (typically 3 \sim 4 GeV without the DM self-interaction) can be slightly increased. We discuss the prospect of detecting DM self-interaction in IceCube-PINGU using the annihilation channels χχτ+τ,ννˉ\chi\chi \rightarrow \tau^{+}\tau^{-}, \nu\bar{\nu} as examples. The PINGU sensitivities to DM self-interaction cross section σχχ\sigma_{\chi\chi} are estimated for track and cascade events.

Cite

@article{arxiv.1408.5471,
  title  = {Probing Dark Matter Self-Interaction in the Sun with IceCube-PINGU},
  author = {Chian-Shu Chen and Fei-Fan Lee and Guey-Lin Lin and Yen-Hsun Lin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1408.5471},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

20 pages, 24 Figures; matches the published version

R2 v1 2026-06-22T05:37:27.367Z