A novel way of constraining WIMPs annihilations in the Sun: MeV neutrinos

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Published 7 August 2013 Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd
, , Citation Nicolás Bernal et al JCAP08(2013)011 DOI 10.1088/1475-7516/2013/08/011

1475-7516/2013/08/011

Abstract

Annihilation of dark matter particles accumulated in the Sun would produce a flux of high-energy neutrinos whose prospects of detection in neutrino telescopes and detectors have been extensively discussed in the literature. However, for annihilations into Standard Model particles, there would also be a flux of neutrinos in the MeV range from the decays at rest of muons and positively charged pions. These low-energy neutrinos have never been considered before and they open the possibility to also constrain dark matter annihilation in the Sun into e+e, μ+μ or light quarks. Here we perform a detailed analysis using the recent Super-Kamiokande data in the few tens of MeV range to set limits on the WIMP-nucleon scattering cross section for different annihilation channels and computing the evaporation rate of WIMPs from the Sun for all values of the scattering cross section in a consistent way.

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10.1088/1475-7516/2013/08/011