Gravitational focusing effects on streaming dark matter as a new detection concept

Abstract: Cosmological simulations for cold dark matter (DM) indicate that a large number of streams might exist in our Galaxy. The present work incorporates gravitational focusing (GF) effects on streaming DM constituents by the Sun and the Earth preceding their encounter with Earth bound detectors. For streaming DM, the GF gives rise to spatiotemporal flux enhancements of orders of magnitude above the nominal DM density. Remarkably, due to Earth's rotation the derived flux enhancements appear as transient signals lasting about 10 seconds repeating daily for days or weeks. This work presents a novel opportunity for DM signal detection and identification, and the present simulation can be applied to any kind of invisible matter entering the solar system.