Discovering New Light States at Neutrino Experiments

Abstract

Experiments designed to measure neutrino oscillations also provide major opportunities for discovering very weakly coupled states. In order to produce neutrinos, experiments such as LSND collide thousands of Coulombs of protons into fixed targets, while MINOS and MiniBooNE also focus and then dump beams of muons. The neutrino detectors beyond these beam dumps are therefore an excellent arena in which to look for long-lived pseudoscalars or for vector bosons that kinetically mix with the photon. We show that these experiments have significant sensitivity beyond previous beam dumps, and are able to partially close the gap between laboratory experiments and supernovae constraints on pseudoscalars. Future upgrades to the NuMI beamline and Project X will lead to even greater opportunities for discovery. We also discuss thin target experiments with muon beams, such as those available in COMPASS, and show that they constitute a powerful probe for leptophilic PNGBs.

32 text pages, 5 figures, 4 tables

References in corpus (16)

• A Theory of Dark Matter
• Secluded U(1) below the weak scale
• New Fixed-Target Experiments to Search for Dark Gauge Forces
• The COMPASS Experiment at CERN
• CMB Constraints on WIMP Annihilation: Energy Absorption During the Recombination Epoch
• Exciting Dark Matter and the INTEGRAL/SPI 511 keV signal
• Non-Abelian Dark Sectors and Their Collider Signatures
• Probing a Secluded U(1) at B-factories
• Probing Dark Forces and Light Hidden Sectors at Low-Energy e+e- Colliders
• Kinetic Mixing as the Origin of Light Dark Scales
• Candidates for Inelastic Dark Matter
• Bounds on Cross-sections and Lifetimes for Dark Matter Annihilation and Decay into Charged Leptons from Gamma-ray Observations of Dwarf Galaxies
• Breaking the Dark Force
• Constraints from the Muon g-2 on the Parameter Space of the NMSSM
• Detecting light leptophilic gauge boson at BESIII detector
• R-axion detection at LHC