Abstract
In a dedicated run where protons from the Fermilab Booster were delivered directly to the steel beam dump of the Booster Neutrino Beamline (BNB), the MiniBooNE detector was used to search for the production of sub-GeV dark matter particles via vector-boson mediators. The signal searched for was the elastic scattering of dark matter particles off nucleons in the detector mineral oil, with neutrinos being an irreducible background. A review of the experiment, its analysis methods, its results and future perspectives are summarized, demonstrating that beam dump experiments provide a novel and promising approach to dark matter searches.
Highlights
A large body of observations of gravitational phenomena [1] provide strong evidence for dark matter (DM), the lack of positive results from direct searches in the mass range from a few GeV to 10s of TeV [2] have motivated further extensions to the Standard Model (SM) featuring Dark Sectors, additional fields with no charges under the SM symmetries, which under appropriate assumptions are able to provide DM candidates in the sub-GeV mass range
After completing its original physics program on neutrino oscillations and cross section measurements in 2012, the MiniBooNE (MB) experiment at Fermilab conducted a special run in 2013-2014 with enhanced sensitivity to sub-GeV DM, by suppressing the neutrino production in the Booster Neutrino Beamline (BNB)
An additional improvement expected to increase the sensitivity to DM masses > 70 MeV will be to include the information of the timing structure of the Booster proton beam to look for characteristic out-of-time events in the detector associated subluminal massive DM particles
Summary
A large body of observations of gravitational phenomena [1] provide strong evidence for dark matter (DM), the lack of positive results from direct searches in the mass range from a few GeV to 10s of TeV [2] have motivated further extensions to the Standard Model (SM) featuring Dark Sectors, additional fields with no charges under the SM symmetries, which under appropriate assumptions are able to provide DM candidates in the sub-GeV mass range. After completing its original physics program on neutrino oscillations and cross section measurements in 2012, the MiniBooNE (MB) experiment at Fermilab conducted a special run in 2013-2014 with enhanced sensitivity to sub-GeV DM, by suppressing the neutrino production in the BNB.
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