Hunt for sub-GeV dark matter at neutrino facilities: A survey of past and present experiments

Buonocore, Luca; Frugiuele, Claudia; deNiverville, Patrick

doi:10.1103/physrevd.102.035006

Cited by 22 publications

(25 citation statements)

References 66 publications

(103 reference statements)

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“…show the constraints from sensitivity limit recasts of a number of past beam-dump and neutrino experiments including BEBC [95], CHARM-II [96], E137 [97], LSND [28], and NOνA [98] that are implemented following Ref. [99] and presented with the thin solid black line.…”

Section: A Results For Faserν2mentioning

confidence: 99%

Detecting dark matter with far-forward emulsion and liquid argon detectors at the LHC

2021

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New light particles may be produced in large numbers in the far-forward region at the LHC and then decay to dark matter, which can be detected through its scattering in far-forward experiments. We consider the example of invisibly decaying dark photons, which decay to dark matter through A 0 → χχ. The dark matter may then be detected through its scattering off electrons χe − → χe − . We consider the discovery potential of detectors placed on the beam collision axis 480 m from the ATLAS interaction point, including an emulsion detector ðFASERν2Þ and, for the first time, a Forward Liquid Argon Experiment (FLArE). For each of these detector technologies, we devise cuts that effectively separate the single e − signal from the leading neutrino-and muon-induced backgrounds. We find that 10-to 100-tonne detectors may detect hundreds to thousands of dark matter events in the high-luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC) era and will sensitively probe the thermal relic region of parameter space. These results motivate the construction of far-forward emulsion and liquid argon detectors at the LHC, as well as a suitable location to accommodate them, such as the proposed Forward Physics Facility.

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Section: A Results For Faserν2mentioning

confidence: 99%

Detecting dark matter with far-forward emulsion and liquid argon detectors at the LHC

2021

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“…The explanation is that the secondary particles mainly populate the soft part of the spectrum, as it is clearly shown in the left panels of figure 6 and figure 7 which have to be compared with the corresponding right panels describing the spectrum from prompt yields. Moreover, the cross section for the elastic LDM-e − scattering grows with the energy of the incoming dark-matter particle before saturating to a constant behaviour [59]. Hence, we expect that scattering events initiated by LDM particles produced in secondary interactions, being softer, will be less probable.…”

Section: Meson Decaymentioning

confidence: 98%

Sensitivity of the SHiP experiment to light dark matter

Ahdida¹,

Akmete²,

Albanese³

et al. 2021

J. High Energ. Phys.

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Dark matter is a well-established theoretical addition to the Standard Model supported by many observations in modern astrophysics and cosmology. In this context, the existence of weakly interacting massive particles represents an appealing solution to the observed thermal relic in the Universe. Indeed, a large experimental campaign is ongoing for the detection of such particles in the sub-GeV mass range. Adopting the benchmark scenario for light dark matter particles produced in the decay of a dark photon, with αD = 0.1 and mA′ = 3mχ, we study the potential of the SHiP experiment to detect such elusive particles through its Scattering and Neutrino detector (SND). In its 5-years run, corresponding to 2 · 1020 protons on target from the CERN SPS, we find that SHiP will improve the current limits in the mass range for the dark matter from about 1 MeV to 300 MeV. In particular, we show that SHiP will probe the thermal target for Majorana candidates in most of this mass window and even reach the Pseudo-Dirac thermal relic.

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“…the Fermilab-based neutrino experiment MiniBooNE has performed dedicated searches for light DM [19,20] and very recently MicroBooNE has released the first search for heavy neutral leptons (HNL) [21] and for a light Higgs decaying into e + e − [22], but the untapped potential is big, with many past and ongoing experiments having the capability to supersede MiniBooNE's sensitivity [7,8,10,14]. Importantly, these searches can typically be done fully parasitically to the main neutrino program [8,10].…”

Section: Jhep01(2022)048mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The near detectors of long-baseline neutrino experiments, once considered an afterthought to reduce systematic uncertainties in oscillation measurements, are nowadays independent experiments in their own right. Besides delivering a wealth of data on neutrino interaction physics, it has been realized that they could also serve to probe the existence of physics beyond the Standard Model (SM) [1] such as heavy neutral leptons or other new particles, possibly connected to the dark matter (DM) puzzle [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16]. Indeed, signatures of new dark particles at these experiments can be linked in a predictive way to compelling scenarios of light DM.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Searching for physics beyond the Standard Model in an off-axis DUNE near detector

Breitbach

Buonocore

Frugiuele

et al. 2022

J. High Energ. Phys.

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Next generation neutrino oscillation experiments like DUNE and T2HK are multi-purpose observatories, with a rich physics program beyond oscillation measurements. A special role is played by their near detector facilities, which are particularly well-suited to search for weakly coupled dark sector particles produced in the primary target. In this paper, we demonstrate this by estimating the sensitivity of the DUNE near detectors to the scattering of sub-GeV DM particles and to the decay of sub-GeV sterile neutrinos (“heavy neutral leptons”). We discuss in particular the importance of the DUNE-PRISM design, which allows some of the near detectors to be moved away from the beam axis. At such off-axis locations, the signal-to-background ratio improves for many new physics searches. We find that this leads to a dramatic boost in the sensitivity to boosted DM particles interacting mainly with hadrons, while for boosted DM interacting with leptons, data taken on-axis leads to marginally stronger exclusion limits. Searches for heavy neutral leptons perform equally well in both configurations.

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Hunt for sub-GeV dark matter at neutrino facilities: A survey of past and present experiments

Cited by 22 publications

References 66 publications

Detecting dark matter with far-forward emulsion and liquid argon detectors at the LHC

Detecting dark matter with far-forward emulsion and liquid argon detectors at the LHC

Sensitivity of the SHiP experiment to light dark matter

Searching for physics beyond the Standard Model in an off-axis DUNE near detector

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