Direct Detection of Ultralight Dark Matter via Charged Lepton Flavor Violation

Abstract

We propose a dark matter direct-detection strategy using charged particle decays at accelerator-based experiments. If ultralight $(m_{\varphi }\ll \text{eV})$ dark matter has a misalignment abundance, its local field oscillates in time at a frequency set by its mass. If it also couples to flavor-changing neutral currents, rare exotic decays such as $\mu \to e{\varphi }^{\prime }$ and $\tau \to e(\mu ){\varphi }^{\prime }$ inherit this modulation. Focusing on such charged lepton flavor-violating decays, we show that sufficient event samples can enable detection of ultralight dark matter candidates at Mu3e, Belle-II, and FCC-ee.

6 pages, 3 figures; 10 pages of Supplemental Material. Published version

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