Abstract
We investigate the feasibility of a high statistics experiment to search for invisible decay modes in nuclear gamma cascades using 200 kg of %36 Cs(Tl) scintillators that are presently available at Texas A\&M. The experiment aims to search for missing energy by robustly establishing the absence of a photon in a well identified gamma cascade. We report on the experimental demonstration of the energy resolution necessary for this search. Prior explorations of this detector concept focused on baryonically coupled physics that could be emitted in $E_2$ transitions. We point out that this protocol can also search for particles that are coupled to photons by searching for the conversion of a photon produced in a gamma cascade into a hidden particle. Examples of these processes include the oscillation of a photon into a hidden photon and the conversion of a photon into an axion-like-particle either in the presence of a magnetic field or via the Primakoff process. This proof-of-concept apparatus appears to have the ability to search for hitherto unconstrained baryonically coupled scalars and pseudoscalars produced in $E_0$ and $M_0$ transitions. If successfully implemented, this experiment serves as a pathfinder for a larger detector with greater containment that can thoroughly probe the existence of new particles with mass below 4 MeV that lie in the poorly constrained supernova ``trapping window'' that exists between 100 keV and 30 MeV.
Highlights
There are considerable theoretical motivations to search for light, weakly coupled particles
We investigate the feasibility of a high statistics experiment to search for invisible decay modes in nuclear gamma cascades using 200 kg of Cs(Tl) scintillators that are presently available at Texas A&M
The investigations performed in this paper using the 36 Cs(Tl) scintillators available at Texas A&M show that a proof of concept experimental apparatus using these scintillators can yield science results in nuclei with E0 and M0 transitions, probing presently unconstrained parameter space for scalars and pseudoscalars coupled to nucleons
Summary
There are considerable theoretical motivations to search for light, weakly coupled particles. These particles could constitute the dark matter or act as mediators between the standard model (SM) and the dark sector [1]. They arise in several frameworks of physics beyond the standard model that address theoretical puzzles such as the strong CP problem [2,3,4], the hierarchy problem [5], the cosmological constant problem [6,7], and the quantum nature of gravity.
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