Subject: [Grappa] GRAPPA Seminar on Oct 29: Sofia Sivertsson (KTH)
Date: October 28, 2012 10:38:06 PM GMT+01:00
Note special venue: D1.116
Date: October 29 (Monday)
Time: 12:00-13:00
Place: D1.116
Speaker: Sofia Sivertsson (KTH)
Title: WIMP diffusion in the Solar System and the neutrino signal from the Sun and the Earth
Abstract:
Dark matter in the form of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) can be captured by the Sun and the Earth, sink to their cores, annihilate and produce neutrinos that can be searched for with neutrino telescopes. The predicted capture rates of WIMPs in the Sun and especially the Earth are very sensitive to the gravitational effects of the planets in the solar system. As a consequence the predicted capture rate by the Earth have varied substantially in the past as our understanding of the dynamics have evolved.
In the work presented here we found that parts of the solar system dynamics previously treated by computer simulations can in fact be treated analytically. A consequence of this insight is the realization that WIMPs captured by weak scatterings in the Sun also constitute an important bound WIMP population in the solar system. Taking this population, and its interplay with the population bound through gravitational diffusion, into account one finds that the planetary effects on the capture rates are essentially cancelled. The neutrino signals from WIMP annihilations in the Sun and the Earth are thus significantly higher than previously believed.
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