Nuclear Production and Analytic Attenuation of Energetic MeV Solar Dark Matter

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel solar production mechanism for MeV-scale dark matter via nuclear fusion processes, and develops an analytical model to study how the Sun attenuates this dark matter flux, with implications for detection experiments.

Contribution

It presents a new solar production channel for MeV dark matter through nuclear fusion and an analytical formalism to evaluate solar attenuation effects on the dark matter flux.

Findings

Proposes a fusion-based solar production mechanism for MeV dark matter.

Develops an analytical Boltzmann equation framework for solar attenuation.

Illustrates projected sensitivity with Argon target in DarkSide-LowMass.

Abstract

We propose a solar production mechanism of MeV dark matter to overcome the energy threshold in direct detection experiments. In particular, the proton and deuteron fussion to ${}^3 \mathrm{He}$ of the $pp$ chain that produces energetic neutrino and gamma photon with 5.5$\,$MeV of energy release can also produce a pair of dark matter particles. Besides, we establish an analytical formalism of using the Boltzmann equation to study the solar attenuation effect on the produced dark matter flux. The projected sensitivity is illustrated with Argon target at the DarkSide-LowMass experiment.