High-Energy Neutrinos From Dark Matter Particle Self-Capture Within the Sun

Abstract

A potential flux of high-energy neutrinos from the annihilation of dark matter particles trapped within the Sun has been exploited to place indirect limits on particle dark matter. In most models, the dark matter interacts weakly, but the possibility of a dark matter particle with a large cross section for elastic scattering with itself has been proposed in several contexts. I study the consequences of such dark matter self-interactions for the high-energy neutrino flux from annihilation within the Sun. The self-interaction may allow dark matter in the halo to be captured within the Sun by scattering off of previously-captured dark matter within the Sun. This effect is not negligible in acceptable and accessible regions of parameter space. Enhancements in the predicted high-energy neutrino flux from the Sun of tens to hundreds of percent can be realized in broad regions of parameter space. Enhancements as large as factors of several hundred may be realized in extreme regions of the viable parameter space. Large enhancements require the dark matter annihilation cross section to be relatively small, sigma*v <~ 10^-27 cm^3/s. This phenomenology is interesting. First, self-capture is negligible for the Earth, so dark matter self-interactions break the correspondence between the solar and terrestrial neutrino signals. Likewise, the correspondence between indirect and direct detection limits on scattering cross sections on nuclei is broken by the self-interaction. These broken correspondences may evince strong dark matter self-interactions. In some cases, self-capture can lead to observable indirect signals in regions of parameter space where limits on dark matter-nucleon cross sections from direct detection would indicate that no such signal should be observable.