Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Lawson, K.
• Zhitnitsky, A. R.

Titel

Solar neutrino spectrum of quark nugget dark matter

Ist Teil von

• Physical review. D, 2017-03, Vol.95 (6), Article 063521

Ort / Verlag

College Park: American Physical Society

Erscheinungsjahr

2017

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• The capture of dark matter by the Sun and its subsequent annihilation may produce an observable feature in the solar neutrino spectrum. We analyze this possibility in the case where the dark matter takes the form of heavy nuggets of quark matter. In this scenario neutrinos are produced in nuclear annihilations deep within the quark matter. The production of neutrinos and antineutrinos at typical nuclear annihilation energies in the 20–50 MeV range is strongly constrained by data from Super-Kamiokande and in this region there is no background from conventional solar processes. However, we demonstrate that a cascade generated by a nuclear annihilation within the nuggets rapidly transfers its energy down to the lightest pseudo-Goldstone mesons (the pions and Kaons) which have masses in the ≲20  MeV range, significantly lighter than the vacuum mesons for which mπ≃140  MeV. Thus, the decay of these light pseudo-Goldstone modes of the quark matter phase will not produce neutrinos at the same scale as those seen from annihilations occurring in vacuum. In this work we predict the basic properties of the resulting neutrino spectrum and argue that, while nuggets composed of purely nuclear matter would be effectively ruled out by present neutrino flux constraints, there remains a wide class of viable models. Furthermore, we emphasize the potential for continued neutrino observations with the current generation of detectors to offer a strong test of these models.