darkinferno

DarkInferno is a package for computing the temperature profile within the core of rocky planets, including the Earth, due to heating from the annihilation of captured dark matter.

DarkInferno provides two scripts. darkinfernoradius.py computes the steady-state temperature profile for given values of the dark matter mass and dark matter-nucleon scattering cross section, and returns the radial distance to which the inner core is melted. darkinfernotimedependent.py computes the temperature profile as a function of time, assuming a uniform initial temperature. It then outputs the temperature at 400 km, as a function of time, as a list. The framework uses ASTERIA to model dark matter capture in the Earth.

Example use

Refer to the jupyter notebook demonstrating the usee of both scripts.

To compute the melting radius in steady-state, assuming a dark matter mass of 1 TeV ($10^3$ GeV) and a cross section of $10^{-37}$ cm^2, you can run the code below.

python darkinfernoradius.py 3 -37

To compute the temperature at a radius of 400 km as a function of time, assuming $10^3$ GeV dark matter mass, 5 TW heat injection, $T_0$ = 5500 K, and k = 100 W/m/K, you can run the code below.

python darkinfernotimedependent.py 3 5 5500 100

Acknowledgements

The development of DarkInferno has been supported by the McDonnell Center for Space Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.