PASSAT at Future Neutrino Experiments: Hybrid Beam-Dump-Helioscope Facilities to Probe Light Axion-Like Particles

TL;DR

This paper proposes a novel hybrid beam-dump-helioscope experiment, PASSAT, to detect axion-like particles via their conversion to photons, offering new parameter space coverage in future neutrino experiments like DUNE.

Contribution

It introduces PASSAT, a new experimental approach combining beam-dump and helioscope techniques, to probe ALPs through photon conversion in a magnetic field, complementing existing methods.

Findings

DUNE-like experiments can probe ALP-photon coupling down to a few times 10^{-5} GeV^{-1}.

Adding a CAST or BabyIAXO-like magnet improves sensitivity to about 10^{-6} GeV^{-1}.

The proposed setup explores a unique parameter space not covered by decay or LSW experiments.

Abstract

There are broadly three channels to probe axion-like particles (ALPs) produced in the laboratory: through their subsequent decay to Standard Model (SM) particles, their scattering with SM particles, or their subsequent conversion to photons. Decay and scattering are the most commonly explored channels in beam-dump type experiments, while conversion has typically been utilized by light-shining-through-wall (LSW) experiments. A new class of experiments, dubbed PASSAT (Particle Accelerator helioScopes for Slim Axion-like-particle deTection), has been proposed to make use of the ALP-to-photon conversion in a novel way: ALPs, after being produced in a beam-dump setup, turn into photons in a magnetic field placed near the source. It has been shown that such hybrid beam-dump-helioscope experiments can probe regions of parameter space that have not been investigated by other laboratory-based experiments, hence providing complementary information; in particular, they probe a fundamentally different region than decay or LSW experiments. We propose the implementation of PASSAT in future neutrino experiments, taking a DUNE-like experiment as an example. We demonstrate that the magnetic field in the planned DUNE multi-purpose detector is already capable of probing the ALP-photon coupling down to $g_{a\gamma\gamma} \sim {\rm few}\times 10^{-5}$ GeV$^{-1}$ for ALP masses $m_a \lesssim 10$ eV. The implementation of a CAST or BabyIAXO-like magnet would improve the sensitivity down to $g_{a\gamma\gamma} \sim 10^{-6}$ GeV$^{-1}$.