Abstract.
Direct detection experiments search for rare scatterings between dark matter (DM) particles from the Milky Way’s halo and target atoms in the laboratory. These experiments lose sensitivity to DM particles below a certain critical mass, since lighter particles do not carry enough kinetic energy to trigger the detector.
However, sub-GeV DM particles which enter the Sun could potentially scatter off hot particles of the solar plasma and get “reflected” with a significant velocity boost. Due to their larger energies, reflected DM particles can also deposit more energy in Earth-based detectors. I will discuss how to describe the particle flux and energy spectrum of solar reflection both with analytical and numerical methods. Furthermore I will show how solar reflection might enable experiments to probe parameter space which would be inaccessible to ordinary halo DM alone.
(The slides will be available here)