Detecting dark matter through dark photons from the Sun: Charged particle signatures

作者：Feng Jonathan L^*; Smolinsky Jordan; Tanedo Philip

来源：PHYSICAL REVIEW D, 2016, 93(11): 115036.

DOI：10.1103/PhysRevD.93.115036

Dark matter may interact with the Standard Model through the kinetic mixing of dark photons, A', with Standard Model photons. Such dark matter will accumulate in the Sun and annihilate into dark photons. The dark photons may then leave the Sun and decay into pairs of charged Standard Model particles that can be detected by the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS). The directionality of this "dark sunshine" is distinct from all astrophysical backgrounds, providing an opportunity for unambiguous dark matter discovery by AMS. We perform a complete analysis of this scenario including Sommerfeld enhancements of dark matter annihilation and the effect of the Sun's magnetic field on the signal, and we define a set of cuts to optimize the signal probability. With the three years of data already collected, AMS may discover dark matter with mass 1 TeV less than or similar to m(X) less than or similar to 10 TeV, dark photon masses m(A') similar to O(100) MeV, and kinetic mixing parameters 10(-11) less than or similar to epsilon less than or similar to 10(-8). The proposed search extends beyond existing beam dump and supernova bounds, and it is complementary to direct detection, probing the same region of parameter space.

• 出版日期2016-6-28