Search by the SENSEI Experiment for Millicharged Particles Produced in the NuMI Beam

Creators: Barak, Liron¹; Bloch, Itay M.^{2, 3}; Botti, Ana M.⁴; Cababie, Mariano^{5, 4}; Cancelo, Gustavo⁴; Cervantes-Vergara, Brenda A.⁴; Chaplinsky, Luke^{6, 7}; Crisler, Michael⁴; Drlica-Wagner, Alex^{4, 8}; Essig, Rouven⁷; Estrada, Juan⁴; Etzion, Erez¹; Moroni, Guillermo Fernandez⁴; Holland, Stephen E.³; Korn, Yaron¹; Lawson, Ian; Luoma, Steffon; Munagavalasa, Sravan^{8, 7}; Orly, Aviv¹; Perez, Santiago E.^{5, 4}; Rodrigues, Dario^{5, 9}; Saffold, Nathan A.⁴; Scorza, Silvia¹⁰; Singal, Aman⁷; Haro, Miguel Sofo^{4, 11}; Stefanazzi, Leandro⁴; Stifter, Kelly⁴; Tiffenberg, Javier⁴; Uemura, Sho⁴; Volansky, Tomer¹; Yu, Tien-Tien¹²; Harnik, Roni⁴; Liu, Zhen¹³; Plestid, Ryan¹⁴; SENSEI Collaboration

1. Tel Aviv University
2. University of California, Berkeley
3. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
4. Fermilab
5. University of Buenos Aires
6. University of Massachusetts Amherst
7. Stony Brook University
8. University of Chicago
9. CONICET - Universidad de Buenos Aires, Instituto de Física de Buenos Aires (IFIBA), Buenos Aires, Argentina
10. Grenoble Institute of Technology
11. Bariloche Atomic Centre
12. University of Oregon
13. University of Minnesota
14. California Institute of Technology

Abstract

Millicharged particles appear in several extensions of the standard model, but have not yet been detected. These hypothetical particles could be produced by an intense proton beam striking a fixed target. We use data collected in 2020 by the SENSEI experiment in the MINOS cavern at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory to search for ultrarelativistic millicharged particles produced in collisions of protons in the NuMI beam with a fixed graphite target. The absence of any ionization events with 3 to 6 electrons in the SENSEI data allow us to place world-leading constraints on millicharged particles for masses between 30 to 380 MeV. This work also demonstrates the potential of utilizing low-threshold detectors to investigate new particles in beam-dump experiments, and motivates a future experiment designed specifically for this purpose. Published by the American Physical Society 2024

Copyright and License

Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

Acknowledgement

We are grateful for the support of the Heising-Simons Foundation under Grant No. 79921. This work was supported by Fermilab under U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Contract No. DE-AC02-07CH11359. The CCD development work was supported in part by the Director, Office of Science, of the DOE under No. DE-AC02-05CH11231. R. E. acknowledges support from DOE Grant DE-SC0009854 and Simons Investigator in Physics Award 623940. The work of T. V. and E. E. is supported by the I-CORE Program of the Planning Budgeting Committee and the Israel Science Foundation (Grant No. 1937/12). T. V. is further supported by the European Research Council (ERC) under the EU Horizon 2020 Programme (ERC- CoG-2015 -Proposal No. 682676 LDMThExp), and a grant from The Ambrose Monell Foundation, given by the Institute for Advanced Study. The work of S. U. is supported in part by the Zuckerman STEM Leadership Program. I. B. is grateful for the support of the Alexander Zaks Scholarship, The Buchmann Scholarship, and the Azrieli Foundation. R. P. is funded by the Neutrino Theory Network Program Grant under Grant No. DEAC02-07CHI11359 and the U.S. DOE under Award No. DE-SC0020250. R. P. is also supported in part by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of High Energy Physics, under Award No. DE-SC0011632 and by the Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics. I. L. and S. L. are supported by the Canada Foundation for Innovation through the Major Science Initiatives Fund and the Province of Ontario Ministry of Colleges and Universities. The work of Z. L. was supported in part by the DOE Grants No. DE-SC0022345 and No. DE-SC0011842. This manuscript has been authored by Fermi Research Alliance, LLC under Contract No. DE-AC02-07CH11359 with the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of High Energy Physics. The U.S. Government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the U.S. Government retains a nonexclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, world-wide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript, or allow others to do so, for U.S. Government purposes.

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