Observing a light dark matter beam with neutrino experiments

By P. deNiverville, M. Pospelov, A. Ritz. 2011

211 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We consider the sensitivity of fixed-target neutrino experiments at the luminosity frontier to light stable states, such as those present in models of MeV-scale dark matter. To ensure the correct thermal relic abundance, such states must annihilate via light mediators, which in turn provide an access portal for direct production in colliders or fixed targets. Indeed, this framework endows the neutrino beams produced at fixed-target facilities with a companion 'dark matter beam', which may be detected via an excess of elastic scattering events off electrons or nuclei in the (near-)detector. We study the high-luminosity proton fixed-target experiments at LSND and MiniBooNE, and determine that the ensuing sensitivity to light dark matter generally surpasses that of other direct probes. For scenarios with a kinetically-mixed U(1){sup '} vector mediator of mass m{sub V}, we find that a large volume of parameter space is excluded for m{sub DM}{approx}1-5 MeV, covering vector masses 2m{sub DM} < or approx. m{sub V} < or approx. m{sub {eta}} and a range of kinetic mixing parameters reaching as low as {kappa}{approx}10{sup -5}. The corresponding MeV-scale dark matter scenarios motivated by an explanation of the galactic 511 keV line are thus strongly constrained.

Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f4e3810e9ae220e010e0b2bef8ef942a0689f262

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In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

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Citations in the corpus

• A Proposal for a Three Detector Short-Baseline Neutrino Oscillation Program in the Fermilab Booster Neutrino Beam (2015, background): “[82] Patrick deNiverville, Maxim Pospelov, and Adam Ritz, “Observing a light dark matter beam with neutrino experiments,” Phys.”
• Radio for hidden-photon dark matter detection (2014, background): “There has been much recent interest in hidden-sector photons, and limits come from astrophysical production and collider experiments [22–39].”
• Constraining light dark matter with diffuse X-ray and gamma-ray observations (2013, background): “Such DM can be probed at colliders [10–15], at direct detection experiments [9, 16, 17], and at proton- and electron-beam dumps [18–23].”
• The Long-Baseline Neutrino Experiment: Exploring Fundamental Symmetries of the Universe (2013, background): “Recently, a great deal of interest has been paid to the possibility of studying models of light (sub-GeV) Dark Matter at low-energy, fixed-target experiments [303,304,305,306].”
• A facility to search for hidden particles at the CERN SPS: the SHiP physics case (2015, background): “This scattering process, as well as scattering on nucleons and nuclei, can be viewed as the search channels for light dark matter [157, 161, 162].”
• Direct detection of sub-GeV dark matter with semiconductor targets (2015, background): “A second set of constraints bound some combination of , αD, and mA′ : the electron beam-dump E137 [57, 82] and the proton beam-dump LSND [60, 83, 84].”
• Physics beyond colliders at CERN: beyond the Standard Model working group report (2019, background): “Limits in the low mass range come from a re-interpretation by theorists of old results from the LSND [210] and E137 [194] experiments, and as such, should be taken with many caveats.”
• Dark matter, millicharges, axion and scalar particles, gauge bosons, and other new physics with LDMX (2018, methodology): “Regions excluded by existing data from the BaBar invisible search [96], DM scattering at LSND [85], E137 [16, 86], and MiniBooNE [95], as well as electron beam dumps E137 [16] and Orsay [15] are shown in gray.”
• Constraining light dark matter with low-energy e+e− colliders (2013, background): “The gray shaded region is a constraint from LSND [74], assuming αD = 0.”
• Search for vector mediator of dark matter production in invisible decay mode (2017, methodology): “05 GeV the obtained bounds are more stringent than the limits obtained from the results of LSND [24, 36] and E137 [37].”
• Vector Dark Matter from Inflationary Fluctuations (2015, background): “[41] P.”