Hadrophilic Dark Sectors at the Forward Physics Facility

TL;DR

This paper explores hadrophilic dark sector models with specific gauge bosons, analyzing their current constraints and proposing new experimental signatures detectable at the Forward Physics Facility during LHC operations.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of hadrophilic dark sector models with U(1) gauge symmetries, highlighting novel experimental signatures and their detectability at the FPF.

Findings

Models predict detectable hadronic decay signatures in FASER during LHC Run 3.

Enhanced tau neutrino scattering rates could be observed in forward neutrino detectors.

Dark matter interactions could be probed in FLArE during HL-LHC era.

Abstract

Models with light dark sector and dark matter particles motivate qualitatively new collider searches. Here we carry out a comprehensive study of hadrophilic models with U(1)$_B$ and U(1)$_{B-3L_{\tau}}$ gauge bosons coupled to light dark matter. The new mediator particles in these models couple to quarks, but have suppressed couplings to leptons, providing a useful foil to the well-studied dark photon models. We consider current bounds from accelerator and collider searches, rare anomaly-induced decays, neutrino non-standard interactions, and dark matter direct detection. Despite the many existing constraints, these models predict a range of new signatures that can be seen in current and near future experiments, including dark gauge boson decays to the hadronic final states $\pi^+ \pi^- \pi^0$, $\pi^0 \gamma$, $K^+ K^-$, and $K_S K_L$ in FASER at LHC Run 3, enhancements of $\nu_{\tau}$ scattering rates in far-forward neutrino detectors, and thermal dark matter scattering in FLArE in the HL-LHC era. These models therefore motivate an array of different experiments in the far-forward region at the LHC, as could be accommodated in the proposed Forward Physics Facility.