Isospin-Violating Dark Matter and Neutrinos From the Sun

TL;DR

This paper investigates how isospin-violating dark matter interactions affect neutrino signals from the Sun, revealing that neutrino telescopes can impose strong constraints on such models, especially if annihilation favors heavy particles.

Contribution

It highlights the impact of isospin violation on indirect dark matter detection via neutrinos and shows that neutrino constraints can challenge certain dark matter models favored by direct detection signals.

Findings

Neutrino telescopes can impose stronger constraints than direct detection for isospin-violating dark matter.

Annihilation into heavy quarks or tau leptons is disfavored by neutrino constraints.

Light flavor final states are preferred for viable isospin-violating dark matter models.

Abstract

We study the indirect detection of dark matter through neutrino flux from their annihilation in the center of the Sun, in a class of theories where the dark matter-nucleon spin-independent interactions break the isospin symmetry. We point out that, while the direct detection bounds with heavy targets like Xenon are weakened and reconciled with the positive signals in DAMA and CoGeNT experiments, the indirect detection using neutrino telescopes can impose a relatively stronger constraint and brings tension to such explanation, if the annihilation is dominated by heavy quark or $\tau$-lepton final states. As a consequence, the qualified isospin violating dark matter candidate has to preferably annihilate into light flavors.