Dark matter beams at LBNF

Abstract

High-intensity neutrino beam facilities may produce a beam of light dark matter when protons strike the target. Searches for such a dark matter beam using its scattering in a nearby detector must overcome the large neutrino background. We characterize the spatial and energy distributions of the dark matter and neutrino beams, focusing on their differences to enhance the sensitivity to dark matter. We find that a dark matter beam produced by a $Z^{\prime }$ boson in the GeV mass range is both broader and more energetic than the neutrino beam. The reach for dark matter is maximized for a detector sensitive to hard neutral-current scatterings, placed at a sizable angle off the neutrino beam axis. In the case of the Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility (LBNF), a detector placed at roughly 6 degrees off axis and at a distance of about 200 m from the target would be sensitive to $Z^{\prime }$ couplings as low as 0.05. This search can proceed symbiotically with neutrino measurements. We also show that the MiniBooNE and MicroBooNE detectors, which are on Fermilab's Booster beamline, happen to be at an optimal angle from the NuMI beam and could perform searches with existing data. This illustrates potential synergies between LBNF and the short-baseline neutrino program if the detectors are positioned appropriately.

26 pages, 7 figures

References in corpus (8)

• The automated computation of tree-level and next-to-leading order differential cross sections, and their matching to parton shower simulations
• FeynRules - Feynman rules made easy
• The Tevatron at the Frontier of Dark Matter Direct Detection
• Leptophobic Dark Matter at Neutrino Factories
• Signatures of sub-GeV dark matter beams at neutrino experiments
• Hidden GeV-scale interactions of quarks
• GeV-scale dark matter: production at the Main Injector
• Search for the Invisible Decay of $\jpsi$ in $\psi (2S)\to \pi +{\pi }^{-}J/\psi$

Cited by in corpus (36)

• New constraints on light vectors coupled to anomalous currents
• Search for pair and single production of vectorlike quarks in final states with at least one $Z$ boson decaying into a pair of electrons or muons in $pp$ collision data collected with the ATLAS detector at $\sqrt{s}=13$ TeV
• Dark Matter Search in Nucleon, Pion, and Electron Channels from a Proton Beam Dump with MiniBooNE
• Light dark matter in neutrino beams: production modelling and scattering signatures at MiniBooNE, T2K and SHiP
• Strong New Limits on Light Dark Matter from Neutrino Experiments
• Millicharged particles in neutrino experiments
• Dark Matter Search in a Proton Beam Dump with MiniBooNE
• Constraining New Physics Models with Isotope Shift Spectroscopy
• White Paper on New Opportunities at the Next-Generation Neutrino Experiments (Part 1: BSM Neutrino Physics and Dark Matter)
• Proton Fixed-Target Scintillation Experiment to Search for Minicharged Particles
• Probing Light Dark Matter with a Hadrophilic Scalar Mediator
• Detecting Dark Matter with Far-Forward Emulsion and Liquid Argon Detectors at the LHC
• Dark Matter "Collider" from Inelastic Boosted Dark Matter
• Mono-Neutrino at DUNE: New Signals From Neutrinophilic Thermal Dark Matter
• Hunting On- and Off-Axis for Light Dark Matter with DUNE-PRISM
• First Dark Matter Search Results From Coherent CAPTAIN-Mills
• Probing the Higgs Portal at the Fermilab Short-Baseline Neutrino Experiments
• Searching for Physics Beyond the Standard Model in an Off-Axis DUNE Near Detector
• LSND Constraints on the Higgs Portal
• Dark Sector Production via Proton Bremsstrahlung
• Hunting sub-GeV dark matter with NO$\nu$A near detector
• Secret interactions of neutrinos with light gauge boson at the DUNE near detector
• Dark sector-photon interactions in proton-beam experiments
• Dark Tridents at Off-Axis Liquid Argon Neutrino Detectors
• Scale Invariant FIMP Miracle
• Discovering Dark Matter at the LHC through Its Nuclear Scattering in Far-Forward Emulsion and Liquid Argon Detectors
• Probing sub-GeV dark sectors via high energy proton beams at LBNF/DUNE and MiniBooNE
• The hunt for sub-GeV dark matter at neutrino facilities: a survey of past and present experiments
• First Leptophobic Dark Matter Search from Coherent CAPTAIN-Mills
• BSM Targets at a "Target-less DUNE"
• Shedding Flavor on Dark via Freeze-in: $U(1{)}_{B-3L_i}$ Gauged Extensions
• GeV-Scale Messengers of Planck-Scale Dark Matter
• Extending the Reach of Leptophilic Boson Searches at DUNE and MiniBooNE with Bremsstrahlung and Resonant Production
• Complementarity between Cosmic String Gravitational Waves and long-lived particle searches in a laboratory
• Inelastic Dark Matter at the Fermilab Short Baseline Neutrino Program
• Enhancing the Sensitivity to Seesaw Predictions in Gauged $B-L$ Scenarios