Luminous solar neutrinos I: Dipole portals

Abstract

Solar neutrinos upscattering inside the Earth can source unstable particles that can decay inside terrestrial detectors. Contrary to naive expectations we show that when the decay length is much shorter than the radius of the \emph{Earth} (rather than the detector), the event rate is independent of the decay length. In this paper we study a transition dipole operator (neutrino dipole portal) and show that Borexino's existing data probes previously untouched parameter space in the 0.5--20 MeV regime, complementing recent cosmological and supernova bounds. We briefly comment on similarities and differences with luminous dark matter and comment on future prospects for analogous signals stemming from atmospheric neutrinos.