Abstract
We consider electromagnetically neutral dark states that couple to the photon through higher dimensional effective operators, such as electric and magnetic dipole moment, anapole moment and charge radius operators. We investigate the possibility of probing the existence of such dark states, taking a Dirac fermion $\chi$ as an example, at several representative proton-beam experiments. As no positive signal has been reported, we obtain upper limits (or projected sensitivities) on the corresponding electromagnetic form factors for dark states lighter than several GeV. We demonstrate that while the current limits from proton-beam experiments are at most comparable with those from high-energy electron colliders, future experiments, such as DUNE and SHiP, will be able to improve the sensitivities to electric and magnetic dipole moment interactions, owing to their high intensity.
Highlights
The operation and development of high-intensity proton facilities are the backbone of the world-wide short- and long-baseline neutrino program
In this work we study the production and detection of neutral fermionic dark states χ that carry EM form factors in proton-beam experiments
The detectable signals considered are single electron recoil events at Liquid Scintillator Neutrino Detector (LSND) and MiniBooNE-dark matter (DM), CHARM II, as well as at the proposed Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) and Search for Hidden Particles (SHiP) experiments, and hadronic showers caused by nuclear deep inelastic scattering at E613
Summary
The operation and development of high-intensity proton facilities are the backbone of the world-wide short- and long-baseline neutrino program. Dark sector particles with masses in the GeV-range and below can be produced and lead to observable signals in many previous, existing and upcoming neutrino experiments, such as LSND [1], MiniBooNE [2], COHERENT [3], DUNE [4], among others [5] This dual purpose is further supported by dedicated experiments that aim to probe dark sector states, such as the proposed SHiP experiment or various beam-dump searches in the past; for an overview see [6] and references therein. The interest in light dark states concerns DM detection, and generally aims to test the presence of new sub-GeV particles in nature Taking this broader point of view, in [41] we studied in-depth the possibility that χ particles—not necessarily the main component of DM— carry electromagnetic (EM) form factor interactions. VII and provide further details on our calculations in several appendixes
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