Cosmic rays hitting the solar atmosphere generate neutrinos that interact and oscillate in the Sun and oscillate on the way to Earth. These neutrinos could potentially be detected with neutrino telescopes and will be a background for searches for neutrinos from dark matter annihilation in the Sun. We calculate the flux of neutrinos from these cosmic ray interactions in the Sun and also investigate the interactions near a detector on Earth that give rise to muons. We compare this background with both regular Earth-atmospheric neutrinos and signals from dark matter annihilation in the Sun. Our calculation is performed with an event-based Monte Carlo approach that should be suitable as a simulation tool for experimental collaborations. Our program package is released publicly along with this paper.

We investigate a scenario where dark matter (DM) particles can be captured and accumulate in the Sun, and subsequently annihilate into a pair of long-lived mediators. These mediators can decay further out in the Sun or outside of the Sun. Compared to the standard scenario where DM particles annihilate directly into Standard Model particles close to the solar core, here we also obtain fluxes of gamma rays and charged cosmic rays. We simulate this scenario using a full three-dimensional model of the Sun, and include interactions and neutrino oscillations. In particular, we perform a model-independent study of the complementarity between neutrino and gamma ray fluxes by comparing the recent searches from IceCube, Super-Kamiokande, Fermi-LAT, ARGO and HAWC.

We find that the resulting neutrino fluxes are significantly higher at high energy when the mediators decay further out in the Sun. We also find that gamma ray searches place stronger constraints than neutrino searches on these models even in cases where the mediators decay mainly inside the Sun, except in the approximately inner 10% of the Sun where neutrino searches are more powerful. We present our results in a model-independent manner and release a new version of the WimpSim code that can be used to simulate this scenario for arbitrary mediator models.

If indirect detection searches are to be used to discriminate between dark matter particle models, it is crucial to understand the expected energy spectra of secondary particles such as neutrinos, charged antiparticles and gamma rays emerging from dark matter annihilations in the local Universe. We simulate the dark matter annihilation processes and collect the fluxes of the stable end products in the annihilation. In order to get an estimate of the impact of different modelling of the physics in the annihilation process, we compare fluxes obtained with two popular event generators, Pythia8 and Herwig7. We also consider the possible impact of polarisation of the final state in the annihilation, with a specific focuson the impact on neutrino fluxes from dark matter annihilations in the centre of the Sun. We find that differences between the event generators are larger for yields of hadronic end products such as antiprotons, than for leptonic end products. Concerning polarisation, we conversely find the largest differences in the leptonic spectra. We find that for neutrino fluxes from dark matter annihilations in the Sun, differences between the polarisations of the final state are to some extent washed out by neutrino oscillations and interactions in the Sun.