Thermalization time scales for WIMP capture by the Sun
Pre-published on:
August 16, 2017
Published on:
August 03, 2018
Abstract
This work concerns the process of dark matter capture by the Sun, under the assumption of a Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP). Galactic halo WIMPs can collide with atomic nuclei in the solar interior. If they lose enough kinetic energy in such a collision, they will be bound in orbit. With further collisions, they will settle to thermal equilibrium in the Sun's core, where they can annihilate to produce a flux of neutrinos. Observing such a neutrino signal would be a smoking gun of indirect dark matter particle detection. This work aims to examine the process of thermalization for captured WIMPs, using Monte-Carlo integration of WIMP trajectories, given different WIMP-nucleon interaction operators of a non-relativistic effective field theory. The density of thermalized WIMPs are found to adhere to a thermal profile. With the exceptions of some fine-tuned cases, the thermalization time is significantly shorter than the age of the solar system.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.22323/1.301.0916
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