Neutrino lines from MeV dark matter annihilation and decay in JUNO

TL;DR

This paper evaluates JUNO's potential to detect neutrino lines from MeV dark matter annihilation and decay, providing constraints on cross sections and lifetimes that could test dark matter production models.

Contribution

It presents a model-independent analysis of JUNO's sensitivity to neutrino lines from MeV dark matter, offering new constraints on annihilation cross sections and decay lifetimes.

Findings

JUNO can constrain DM annihilation cross section below 4×10^{-26} cm^3/sec for 15-50 MeV DM mass.

JUNO can set DM decay lifetime limits as low as 10^{24} seconds around 100 MeV.

Constraints could test thermal production mechanisms of MeV dark matter.

Abstract

We discuss the discovery potential of JUNO experiment for neutrino lines from MeV dark matter (DM) annihilation and decay in a model independent way. We find that JUNO will be able to give severe constraints on the cross section of DM annihilating into neutrinos and on the lifetime of DM decaying into neutrinos. More concretely, with $20$ years of data-taking in the fiducial volume $17$ kton, the cross section will be constrained smaller than $4\times 10^{-26}\,{\rm cm^{3}\,sec^{-1}}$ for the mass of a DM particle $15\,{\rm MeV} \lesssim m_{\chi} \lesssim 50\,{\rm MeV}$ at $90\,\%$ C.L., which might be strong enough to test thermal production mechanism of DM particles for such range of DM mass. The lifetime will be constrained as strong as $1\times 10^{24}\,{\rm sec}$ for the mass of a DM particle $m_{\chi} \simeq 100\,{\rm MeV}$ at $90\,\%$ C.L..