The distribution of inelastic dark matter in the Sun

TL;DR

This paper investigates how inelastic dark matter particles captured in the Sun thermalize and annihilate, revealing that common assumptions about equilibrium and distribution may not always hold, affecting neutrino detection prospects.

Contribution

The study provides a numerical simulation of inelastic dark matter thermalization in the Sun, challenging the standard Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution assumption and analyzing the impact on annihilation rates.

Findings

Thermalization often does not reach equilibrium in certain parameter regions.

Evaporation due to down-scattering is not significant in reducing dark matter abundance.

The actual dark matter distribution can differ substantially from the Maxwell-Boltzmann approximation.

Abstract

If dark matter is composed of new particles, these may become captured after scattering with nuclei in the Sun, thermalise through additional scattering, and finally annihilate into neutrinos that can be detected on Earth. If dark matter scatters inelastically into a slightly heavier ($\mathcal{O} (10-100)$ keV) state it is unclear whether thermalisation occurs. One issue is that up-scattering from the lower mass state may be kinematically forbidden, at which point the thermalisation process effectively stops. A larger evaporation rate is also expected due to down-scattering. In this work, we perform a numerical simulation of the capture and thermalisation process in order to study the evolution of the dark matter distribution. We then calculate and compare the annihilation rate with that of the often assumed Maxwell--Boltzmann distribution. We also check if equilibrium between capture and annihilation is reached and find that this assumption definitely breaks down in a part of the explored parameter space. We also find that evaporation induced by down-scattering is not effective in reducing the total dark matter abundance.