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Mohamad-Ziad Charif - Antares

Mohamad-Ziad Charif - Antares

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600km/s. If we assume the worst case scenario where dark matter is uniformlyrotating in the opposite direction of the Sun, it would still put dark matter relativespeed below the Sun’s escape velocity ensuring that any dark matter particle thatfalls under the Sun’s gravitation well will get trapped. Additionally as we saw earlier,dark matter by interacting with nuclei can lose kinetic energy and get trappedinside heavy celestial objects. The scenario where WIMPs get trapped inside theSun and get by repeated (over a long time) elastic collisions with the nuclei sinkto the core and annihilate, seems to be an extremely plausible scenario.Additionally the Sun is an attractive search place for dark matter for several reasons,the first one is minimal astrophysical uncertainty as searches for dark matterin the galactic center and galactic halo are very sensitive to the form of the halo(cusped or cored). Searching for dark matter in the Sun does not depend on thehalo shape but on the local density which is independent from the halo shape. Thesecond reason is that the astrophysical background for dark matter search in theSun is cosmic-rays hitting the Sun and via p-p interaction creating neutrinos thatwill come from the direction of the Sun. This effect has been studied[74] and theexpected number of events in a detector such as ANTARES is about 10 −3 eventsper year. The final reason is Solar physics that concern us are quite known andhave minimal uncertainties.After WIMPs annihilate, and through different various channels, we will end upwith neutrinos (unless the channel was via photons or electrons). In order to haveinformation on this neutrino flux and its eventual detection in ANTARES, severalprocesses need to be known and calculated, presented as follows:• Number of WIMPs in the Sun as a function of capture rate and annihilation.• Interaction of the resulting particles from annihilation: τ regeneration, hadronizationof quarks, etc.• Neutrino oscillation and interaction from creation point to the detector.Annihilation rate in the SunThe number of WIMPs in the Sun can be described through the following equation[75]:dNdt= C C −C A .N 2 (2.18)The term C C is the WIMPs capture rate by the Sun this factor is mainly determinedby the spin-dependent cross-section of WIMPs on protons. The term C Ais the annihilation term, which is dependent on the annihilation cross-section ofWIMPS. Now if we want to calculate the WIMPs annihilation rate Γ A (eq 2.19 &26

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