New DAMA dark-matter window and energetic-neutrino searches
- Theoretical Astrophysics, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Batavia, Illinois 60510 (United States)
- Physics Department, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin 53706 (United States)
- California Institute of Technology, Mail Code 130-33, Pasadena, California 91125 (United States)
Recently, the DAMA/LIBRA Collaboration has repeated and reinforced their claim to have detected an annual modulation in their signal rate, and have interpreted this observation as evidence for dark-matter particles at the 8.2{sigma} confidence level. Furthermore, it has also been noted that the effects of channeling may enable a weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP) that scatters elastically via spin-independent interactions from nuclei to produce the signal observed by DAMA/LIBRA without exceeding the limits placed by CDMS, XENON, CRESST, CoGeNT, and other direct-detection experiments. To accommodate this elastic-scattering explanation, however, the mass of the responsible dark-matter particle must be relatively light, m{sub DM} < or approx. 10 GeV. Such dark-matter particles will become captured by and annihilate in the Sun at very high rates, leading to a potentially large flux of GeV-scale neutrinos. We calculate the neutrino spectrum resulting from WIMP annihilations in the Sun and show that existing limits from Super-Kamiokande can be used to close a significant portion of the DAMA region, especially if the dark-matter particles produce tau leptons or neutrinos in a sizable fraction of their annihilations. We also determine the spin-dependent WIMP-nuclei elastic-scattering parameter space consistent with DAMA. The constraints from Super-Kamiokande on the spin-dependent scenario are even more severe--they exclude any self-annihilating WIMP in the DAMA region that annihilates 1% of the time or more to any combination of neutrinos, tau leptons, or charm or bottom quarks.
- OSTI ID:
- 21254738
- Journal Information:
- Physical Review. D, Particles Fields, Vol. 79, Issue 1; Other Information: DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.79.015010; (c) 2009 The American Physical Society; Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 0556-2821
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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