PoS - Proceedings of Science
Volume 301 - 35th International Cosmic Ray Conference (ICRC2017) - Session Dark Matter. DM-indirect searches
Thermalization time scales for WIMP capture by the Sun
A. Widmark
Full text: pdf
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
How to cite

Metadata are provided both in "article" format (very similar to INSPIRE) as this helps creating very compact bibliographies which can be beneficial to authors and readers, and in "proceeding" format which is more detailed and complete.

Open Access
Creative Commons LicenseCopyright owned by the author(s) under the term of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.