Impact of evaporation barriers on solar-captured dark matter distribution and evaporation mass
Xuan Wen (Institute of Theoretical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100190, China, School of Fundamental Physics and Mathematical Sciences, Hangzhou Institute for Advanced Study, UCAS, Hangzhou, 310024, China, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (UCAS), Beijing, 100049, China)
Evaporation determines the low-mass reach of solar-captured dark matter because that reach is controlled by the small population of particles closest to the escape threshold. We present an orbit-space calculation of the non-thermal distribution of captured dark matter in the presence of an evaporation barrier generated by a smooth in-medium attraction sourced by the solar medium. We show that the barrier not only deepens the effective potential but also reshapes the near-threshold phase-space structure, displacing the equilibrium distribution away from weakly bound, escape-prone trajectories and towards more tightly bound core-crossing orbits, thereby suppressing evaporation and lowering the evaporation mass. Although the bulk population remains near thermal equilibrium, the near-threshold tail, as reflected in the projected velocity spectrum, acquires characteristic non-thermal structure because the barrier deforms the bound orbit space and preferentially retains particles that repeatedly traverse the hot solar core. The near-threshold tail is therefore essential for determining the low-mass reach of solar dark-matter searches in the barrier regime, and our orbit-space treatment captures the relevant physics in a controlled way.