Probing Neutrino-Portal Dark Matter at the Forward Physics Facility

TL;DR

The paper explores the potential of the Forward Physics Facility at the LHC to detect neutrino-portal dark matter mediators with masses between 0.3 and 20 GeV, focusing on experimental signatures like neutrino scattering and tau-neutrino excesses.

Contribution

It demonstrates the feasibility of discovering new neutrinophilic mediators at the FPF, highlighting detector requirements and novel search strategies for neutrino-portal dark matter.

Findings

Future FPF detectors can probe mediators with small couplings and masses 0.3-20 GeV.

Signatures include neutrino scattering with missing transverse momentum.

Potential to address neutrino-portal dark matter scenarios.

Abstract

The Forward Physics Facility (FPF), planned to operate near the ATLAS interaction point at the LHC, offers exciting new terrain to explore neutrino properties at TeV energy scales. It will reach an unprecedented regime for terrestrial neutrino experiments and provide the opportunity to reveal new physics of neutrinos at higher energy scales. We demonstrate that future detectors at the FPF have the potential to discover new mediators that couple predominantly to neutrinos, with masses between 0.3 and 20 GeV and small couplings not yet probed by existing searches. Such a neutrinophilic mediator is well motivated for addressing the origin of several neutrino-portal dark matter candidates, including thermal freeze-out and sterile-neutrino dark matter scenarios. Experimentally, the corresponding signatures include neutrino charged-current scattering events associated with large missing transverse momentum, and excessive apparent tau-neutrino events. We discuss the FPF detector capabilities needed for this search, most importantly the hadronic energy resolution.