ALPtraum: ALP production in proton beam dump experiments
By B. Döbrich, J. Jaeckel, Felix Kahlhoefer, A. Ringwald, K. Schmidt-Hoberg. 2015
181 citations recorded by the source corpus.
A bstractWith their high beam energy and intensity, existing and near-future proton beam dumps provide an excellent opportunity to search for new very weakly coupled particles in the MeV to GeV mass range. One particularly interesting example is a so-called axion-like particle (ALP), i.e. a pseudoscalar coupled to two photons. The challenge in proton beam dumps is to reliably calculate the production of the new particles from the interactions of two composite objects, the proton and the target atoms. In this work we argue that Primakoff production of ALPs proceeds in a momentum range where production rates and angular distributions can be determined to sufficient precision using simple electromagnetic form factors. Reanalysing past proton beam dump experiments for this production channel, we derive novel constraints on the parameter space for ALPs. We show that the NA62 experiment at CERN could probe unexplored parameter space by running in ‘dump mode’ for a few days and discuss opportunities for future experiments such as SHiP.
Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b281ba70ee0a972f2eb8d46f8b2647bd38c9017a
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In Nuclear and High Energy Physics
Citations in the corpus
- The Beam and detector of the NA62 experiment at CERN (2017, background): “Furthermore, NA62 is capable of searching for decays of the dark photon, heavy neutral leptons and axion-like particles [84] produced by the interactions of protons from the SPS in the kaon production target or a collimator located downstream in a beam-dump-like experiment.”
- Axion-like particles at future colliders (2018, background): “Current and future beam-dump searches are sensitive to ALPs with masses below ∼ 1 GeV radiated off photons and decaying outside the target [18–21].”
- Physics beyond colliders at CERN: beyond the Standard Model working group report (2019, background): “ALPs and Dark Photons could be radiated from the beam through multiple processes [51] (Primakoff effect, Drell–Yan, proton bremsstrahlung, etc).”
- FASER’s physics reach for long-lived particles (2018, methodology): “[93]), rare decays of light mesons, and the Primakoff process.”
- Particle physics models for the 17 MeV anomaly in beryllium nuclear decays (2016, unknown): “For a mass ma ≈ 17 MeV, all values of this coupling in the range ð1018 GeVÞ−1 < gaγγ < ð10 GeVÞ−1 are experimentally excluded [39,40].”
- The landscape of QCD axion models (2020, background): “These bounds are nicely complemented by constraints from beam dump and reactor experiments which exclude axion (and ALP) masses from MeV up to several GeVs [282–293].”
- Dark matter, millicharges, axion and scalar particles, gauge bosons, and other new physics with LDMX (2018, methodology): “Projections for SHiP [160], a SeaQuestlike experiment with sensitivity to γγ final states [103], Belle II 3 photon search (50 ab−1 integrated luminosity) [161] are shown as thin dashed lines.”
- The ALP miracle: unified inflaton and dark matter (2017, background): “Another interesting aspect of the model with multiple axions is that some of the heavier axions may be searched for in the beam dump experiment like SHiP [38, 39].”
- Collider probes of axion-like particles (2017, methodology): “Future helioscope experiments like the International Axion Observatory (IAXO) [19], and beam-dump experiments such as the facility to Search for Hidden Particles (SHIP) [20, 21], will further improve these constraints for ALP masses below a GeV.”