Search for Milli-Charged particles from the Sun at IceCube

Abstract

It is assumed that heavy dark matter particles ϕ with O(TeV) mass captured by the Sun may decay to relativistic light milli-charged particles (MCPs). These MCPs could be measured by the IceCube detector. The massless hidden photon model was taken for MCPs to interact with nuclei, so that the numbers and fluxes of expected MCPs and neutrinos may be evaluated at IceCube. Based on the assumption that no events are observed at IceCube in 6 years, the corresponding upper limits on MCP fluxes were calculated at 90% C. L. These results indicated that MCPs could be directly detected in the secondaries’ energy range O(100GeV)-O(10TeV) at IceCube, when ϵ2 ≳ 10−10. And a new region of 0.6 MeV < mMCP < 10 MeV and 6 × 10−6 < ϵ ≲ 10−4 is ruled out in the mMCP-ϵ plane with 6 years of IceCube data.