The dark matter self-interaction and its impact on the critical mass for dark matter evaporations inside the sun

TL;DR

This paper investigates how dark matter self-interactions influence its accumulation, evaporation, and neutrino signals inside the Sun, especially for low-mass dark matter particles, and assesses detection prospects with IceCube-PINGU.

Contribution

It demonstrates the significance of dark matter self-interaction effects on evaporation thresholds and neutrino flux, providing new insights into detection strategies.

Findings

Self-interaction enhances dark matter accumulation in the Sun.

Critical evaporation mass can increase slightly due to self-interaction.

IceCube-PINGU can potentially detect dark matter self-interaction effects.

Abstract

We study the capture, annihilation and evaporation of dark matter (DM) inside the Sun. It has been shown that the DM self-interaction can increase the DM number inside the Sun. We demonstrate that this enhancement becomes more significant in the regime of small DM mass, given a fixed DM self-interaction cross section. This leads to the enhancement of neutrino flux from DM annihilation. On the other hand, for DM mass as low as as a few GeVs, not only the DM-nuclei scatterings can cause the DM evaporation, DM self-interaction also provides non-negligible contributions to this effect. Consequently, the critical mass for DM evaporation (typically 3 ~ 4 GeV without the DM self-interaction) can be slightly increased. We discuss the prospect of detecting DM self-interaction in IceCube- PINGU using the annihilation channels $\chi\chi\rightarrow\nu\bar{\nu},\:\tau^{-}\tau^{+}$ as examples. The PINGU sensitivities to DM self-interaction cross section $\sigma_{\chi\chi}$ are estimated for track and cascade events.