Neutrino Probes of the Nature of Light Dark Matter

TL;DR

This paper explores the potential of future large-scale neutrino detectors to identify light dark matter particles by detecting neutrinos from their annihilation in the Sun, achieving high sensitivity at low dark matter masses.

Contribution

It evaluates the capabilities of 34/100 kton liquid argon and 100 kton iron calorimeter detectors for detecting neutrinos from dark matter annihilation, highlighting their precision and sensitivity.

Findings

Detectors can determine neutrino energy and direction with high precision.

Sensitivity to dark matter-nucleon cross sections at the fb to ab level.

Potential to probe dark matter masses between 5-50 GeV.

Abstract

Dark matter particles gravitationally trapped inside the Sun may annihilate into Standard Model particles, producing a flux of neutrinos. The prospects of detecting these neutrinos in future multi-\kton{} neutrino detectors designed for other physics searches are explored here. We study the capabilities of a 34/100 \kton{} liquid argon detector and a 100 \kton{} magnetized iron calorimeter detector. These detectors are expected to determine the energy and the direction of the incoming neutrino with unprecedented precision allowing for tests of the dark matter nature at very low dark matter masses, in the range of 5-50 GeV. By suppressing the atmospheric background with angular cuts, these techniques would be sensitive to dark matter - nucleon spin dependent cross sections at the fb level, reaching down to a few ab for the most favorable annihilation channels and detector technology.