Dark matter capture, subdominant WIMPs, and neutrino observatories

Sebastian Baum, Luca Visinelli, Katherine Freese, and Patrick Stengel
Phys. Rev. D 95, 043007 – Published 22 February 2017

Abstract

Weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), which are among the best motivated dark matter (DM) candidates, could make up all or only a fraction of the total DM budget. We consider a scenario in which WIMPs are a subdominant DM component; such a scenario would affect both current direct and indirect bounds on the WIMP-nucleon scattering cross section. In this paper we focus on indirect searches for the neutrino flux produced by annihilation of subdominant WIMPs captured by the Sun or the Earth via either spin-dependent or spin-independent scattering. We derive the annihilation rate and the expected neutrino flux at neutrino observatories. In our computation, we include an updated chemical composition of the Earth with respect to the previous literature, leading to an increase of the Earth’s capture rate for spin-dependent scattering by a factor of 3. Results are compared with current bounds from Super-Kamiokande and IceCube. We discuss the scaling of bounds from both direct and indirect detection methods with the WIMP abundance.

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  • Received 29 November 2016

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.95.043007

© 2017 American Physical Society

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

  1. Research Areas
Gravitation, Cosmology & Astrophysics

Authors & Affiliations

Sebastian Baum1,2,*, Luca Visinelli1,2,3,†, Katherine Freese1,2,4,‡, and Patrick Stengel4,§

  • 1The Oskar Klein Centre for Cosmoparticle Physics, Department of Physics, Stockholm University, AlbaNova, 10691 Stockholm, Sweden
  • 2Nordita, KTH Royal Institute of Technology and Stockholm University, Roslagstullsbacken 23, 10691 Stockholm, Sweden
  • 3University of Helsinki, P.O. Box 64, FI-00014 Helsinki, Finland
  • 4Departement of Physics, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109, USA

  • *sbaum@fysik.su.se
  • luca.visinelli@fysik.su.se
  • ktfreese@umich.edu
  • §pstengel@umich.edu

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Issue

Vol. 95, Iss. 4 — 15 February 2017

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