The hunt for sub-GeV dark matter at neutrino facilities: a survey of past and present experiments

Abstract

We survey the sensitivity of past and present neutrino experiments to MeV-GeV scale dark matter, and find that these experiments possess novel sensitivity that has not yet fully explored. NO$\nu$A and BEBC are found to rule out the scalar thermal target for dark matter masses between 10 MeV to 100 MeV with existing data, while CHARM-II and MINER$\nu$A place somewhat weaker limits. These limits can be dramatically improved by off-axis searches using the NuMI beamline and the MicroBooNE, MiniBooNE or ICARUS detectors, and can even begin to probe the Majorana thermal target. We conclude that past and present neutrino facilities can search for light dark matter concurrently with their neutrino program and reach a competitive sensitivity to proposed future experiments.

16 pages, 2 figures. v2 Added additional references and a few additional comments

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Cited by in corpus (13)

• Detecting Dark Matter with Far-Forward Emulsion and Liquid Argon Detectors at the LHC
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• Blast from the past: Constraints on the dark sector from the BEBC WA66 beam dump experiment
• Blast from the past II: Constraints on heavy neutral leptons from the BEBC WA66 beam dump experiment
• Searching for Physics Beyond the Standard Model in an Off-Axis DUNE Near Detector
• Dark sector-photon interactions in proton-beam experiments
• Signals of the QCD axion with mass of 17 MeV/c^2: nuclear transitions and light meson decays
• Discovering Dark Matter at the LHC through Its Nuclear Scattering in Far-Forward Emulsion and Liquid Argon Detectors
• Characterizing Dark Matter Signals with Missing Momentum Experiments
• Multicomponent scalar dark matter at high-intensity proton beam experiments
• Inelastic Dark Matter at the Fermilab Short Baseline Neutrino Program
• The Forward Physics Facility at the High-Luminosity LHC
• Neutrino production in the central dark-matter spikes of active galaxies