DAEdALUS and Dark Matter Detection

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that fixed-target neutrino experiments like DAEdALUS can significantly improve dark photon and light dark matter detection sensitivity, surpassing previous bounds and exploring new parameter spaces.

Contribution

It introduces the potential of DAEdALUS with LENA to enhance dark matter searches and compares its sensitivity to LSND, highlighting new capabilities for heavy dark photon detection.

Findings

DAEdALUS can improve LSND bounds on dark photons by an order of magnitude.

Fixed-target experiments can detect dark matter from off-shell dark photons.

LSND is competitive with visible dark photon decay searches.

Abstract

Among laboratory probes of dark matter, fixed-target neutrino experiments are particularly well-suited to search for light weakly-coupled dark sectors. In this paper, we show that the DAEdALUS source setup---an 800 MeV proton beam impinging on a target of graphite and copper---can improve the present LSND bound on dark photon models by an order of magnitude over much of the accessible parameter space for light dark matter when paired with a suitable neutrino detector such as LENA. Interestingly, both DAEdALUS and LSND are sensitive to dark matter produced from off-shell dark photons. We show for the first time that LSND can be competitive with searches for visible dark photon decays, and that fixed-target experiments have sensitivity to a much larger range of heavy dark photon masses than previously thought. We review the mechanism for dark matter production and detection through a dark photon mediator, discuss the beam-off and beam-on backgrounds, and present the sensitivity in dark photon kinetic mixing for both the DAEdALUS/LENA setup and LSND in both the on- and off-shell regimes.