2021/12/31 by Philip Schuster, Natalia Toro, Kevin Zhou
Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysics #Beam (structure) #Beam dump #Boson #Bremsstrahlung #Cosmology #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #Dark energy #Dark matter #Dark photon #Electron #Gauge boson #Gauge theory #Lepton #Light dark matter #Meson #Missing energy #Momentum (technical analysis) #Neutrino #Nuclear physics #Particle Detector Development and Performance #Particle physics #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #Photon #Physics #Quantum mechanics #Scalar field dark matter #Vector boson #Vector meson #hep-ex #hep-ph #nucl-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.105.035036
published as Phys. Rev. D 105, 035036 (2022) · 18 pages, 11 figures. v2: paragraph added, matches journal version
arxiv created 2022/02/28 · openalex publication_date 2022/02/28 · arxiv updated 2022/03/01 · openalex created_date 2022/04/03 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06
Electron beam fixed target experiments such as NA64 and LDMX use missing energy-momentum to detect the production of dark matter and other long-lived states. The most studied production mechanism is dark Bremsstrahlung through a vector mediator. In this work, we explore a complementary source of missing energy-momentum signals: Bremsstrahlung photons can convert to hard vector mesons in exclusive photoproduction processes, which then decay to dark matter or other invisible particles, such as neutrinos. We find that existing NA64 data can improve the leading constraints on invisible light vector meson decays, while a future run of LDMX could improve them by up to 5 orders of magnitude. For the examples of a dark photon and a U(1)B gauge boson mediator, accounting for meson decays substantially enhances these experiments' sensitivity, especially to thermal relic dark matter of mass mχ\gtrsim 0.1 GeV.