Limits on the production of neutral penetrating states in a beam dump

Abstract

We present limits on the production of neutral penetrating states produced in 28 GeV proton nucleus collisions. We obtain limits for light, heavy and unstable neutral states. For light stable states out limit ala P < 2.26 X 10 -69 cm4/nucleon 2 is more than a factor of 5.5 better than previous limits. Time of flight techniques are used to study heavy states. We have poor sensitivity to short-lived states. 0 031-9163/81/0000-0000/S 02.50

Exploring portals to a hidden sector through fixed targets

“…Of course, the idea to search for exotic (un)stable states using fixed targets is far from new and in the past several experimental studies have been performed targeting different types of exotics [3]. In particular, we note the existing experimental searches for axions [4], heavy neutrino states [5], long-lived gluinos [6], unstable light particles in general [7], and light particles with neutral-current-type interactions [8]. Theoretical motivation for these searches often originated from several unrelated considerations, see e.g.…”

Observing a light dark matter beam with neutrino experiments

“…The efficiencies are dependent on the momentum transfer of the scattering, but are quite close to unity for Q 2 ∈ [0.4, 1] GeV 2 [36]. We have not made a distinction between bound and free proton scattering cross sections in (18) or the numerical analysis.…”

“…The momentum transfer cut of 0.1 -1.6 GeV 2 determines the range over which (18), which weights over proton and neutron scattering, is integrated to produce the effective cross-section σ our nucleon-level treatment should be reliable. The remaining factors in (19) are defined as in (13).…”

“…The scattering of light dark matter in the (near-)detector would then generate an additional source of neutral-current-type scattering events (see, e.g. [18]). This prediction implies that a direct search for MeV-scale stable dark matter is possible at experiments at the luminosity frontier, which is the focus of the present paper.…”

“…While the idea of searching for exotics using fixed target facilities is certainly not new (see e.g. [18,[23][24][25][26]), long-baseline neutrino facilities introduce a particular advantage for probing stable states in that the large mass of the (near-)detector can be utilized to observe scattering rather than just the results of a decay. We will argue that these facilities already provide the dominant constraints on many models of this type, and specifically those utilizing the vector portal O SM = F Y µν which are generally less constrained in other ways.…”