Search for Darkonium in $e^{+}{e}^{-}$ Collisions

Abstract

Collider searches for dark sectors, new particles interacting only feebly with ordinary matter, have largely focused on identifying signatures of new mediators, leaving much of dark sector structures unexplored. In particular, the existence of dark matter bound states (darkonia) remains to be investigated. This possibility could arise in a simple model in which a dark photon ($A^{\prime }$) is light enough to generate an attractive force between dark fermions. We report herein a search for a $J^{PC}=1^{--}$ darkonium state, the ${{\rm Y}}_D$, produced in the reaction $e^{+}{e}^{-}\to \gamma {{\rm Y}}_D,{{\rm Y}}_D\to A^{\prime }{A}^{\prime }{A}^{\prime }$, where the dark photons subsequently decay into pairs of leptons or pions, using $514{\text{ fb}}^{-1}$ of data collected with the BABAR detector. No significant signal is observed, and we set bounds on the $\gamma -A^{\prime }$ kinetic mixing as a function of the dark sector coupling constant for $0.001<m_{A^{\prime }}<3.16\text{ GeV}$ and $0.05<m_{{{\rm Y}}_D}<9.5\text{ GeV}$.

arXiv comment10 pages, 22 figures, submitted to Phys. Rev. Lett

References in corpus (13)

• The automated computation of tree-level and next-to-leading order differential cross sections, and their matching to parton shower simulations
• A Theory of Dark Matter
• The BABAR Detector
• Secluded WIMP Dark Matter
• Limits and Confidence Intervals in the Presence of Nuisance Parameters
• Search for a dark photon in e+e- collisions at BABAR
• Exotic Decays of the 125 GeV Higgs Boson
• Probing a Secluded U(1) at B-factories
• New Exclusion Limits on Dark Gauge Forces from Proton Bremsstrahlung in Beam-Dump Data
• Search for $A^{\prime }\to {\mu }^{+}{\mu }^{-}$ decays
• Search for a Hypothetical 16.7 MeV Gauge Boson and Dark Photons in the NA64 Experiment at CERN
• Limit on the production of a new vector boson in ${\mathrm{e}}^{+}{\mathrm{e}}^{-}\to \mathrm{U}\gamma$, U$\to {\pi }^{+}{\pi }^{-}$ with the KLOE experiment
• Probing the Dark Sector with Dark Matter Bound States