Speeding Up Dark Matter With Solar Neutrinos

TL;DR

This paper proposes a new method where solar neutrinos accelerate sub-GeV dark matter particles, enhancing their detectability by direct detection experiments, and derives new constraints on light dark matter interactions.

Contribution

It introduces a novel neutrino portal mechanism that accelerates dark matter using solar neutrinos, enabling new detection strategies and constraints.

Findings

Dark matter can be accelerated to velocities above 10^{-3}c by solar neutrinos.

The resulting dark matter velocity distribution resembles the solar neutrino spectrum.

New limits on light dark matter interactions are derived from reinterpretation of PICO experiment data.

Abstract

We present a novel mechanism of using solar neutrinos to speed up dark matter, inspired by the fact that neutrinos are the most energetic particles from the Sun with a well-understood spectrum. In a neutrino portal dark sector model, we show that dark matter with sub-GeV mass could be accelerated by the $pp$ neutrinos to velocities well above $10^{-3}c$ and capable of depositing large enough energy at direct detection experiments. A crucial ingredient of this mechanism is the dissociation of stable dark matter bound states that exist in Nature. The resulting dark matter velocity distribution bears a strong resemblance in shape to the solar neutrino spectrum. As an application, we derive a leading limit on light dark matter interaction by reinterpreting a recent PICO experiment result.