Solar Reflection of Dark Matter

Understand

The scattering of light dark matter off thermal electrons inside the Sun produces a "fast" sub-component of the dark matter flux that may be detectable in underground experiments.

• We update and extend previous work by analyzing the signatures of dark matter candidates which scatter via light mediators.
• Using numerical simulations of the dark matter-electron interaction in the solar interior, we determine the energy spectrum of the reflected flux, and calculate the expected rates for direct detection experiments.
• We find that large Xenon-based experiments (such as XENON1T) provide the strongest direct limits for dark matter masses below a few MeV, reaching a sensitivity to the effective dark matter charge of better than $\sim 10^{-9}e$.