Dipole portal and neutrinophilic scalars at DUNE revisited: the importance of the high-energy neutrino tail

TL;DR

This paper evaluates DUNE's potential to detect new neutrino-interacting particles, emphasizing the importance of high-energy neutrinos and beam configurations for improving sensitivity to heavy neutral leptons and neutrinophilic scalars.

Contribution

It highlights the significance of the high-energy neutrino tail in DUNE's flux for probing new physics models and compares different detection signatures and beam setups.

Findings

High-energy neutrinos enhance sensitivity to particles up to 10 GeV.

Tau-optimized beam configuration offers slight sensitivity improvements.

Deep-inelastic scattering channels are important for production detection.

Abstract

We estimate the sensitivity of the DUNE experiment to new physics particles interacting with neutrinos, considering the dipole portal to heavy neutral leptons and a neutrinophilic scalar with lepton-number $2$ as examples. We demonstrate that neutrinos from the high-energy tail of the DUNE flux, with energies $E_{\nu}\gtrsim 5-10\text{ GeV}$, may significantly improve the sensitivity to these models, allowing to search for particles as heavy as $\simeq 10\text{ GeV}$. We also study the impact of the so-called tau-optimized neutrino beam configuration, which slightly improves sensitivity to the new physics models considered here. For both models, we consider new production channels (such as deep-inelastic scattering) and provide a detailed comparison of different signatures in the detector.