Long-lived vectors from electromagnetic cascades at SHiP
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1.
Texas A&M University
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2.
California Institute of Technology
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3.
York University
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4.
Fermilab
Abstract
We simulate dark-vector, V, production from electromagnetic cascades at the recently approved SHiP experiment. The cascades (initiated by photons from π0 → γγ) can lead to 3–4 orders of magnitude increase of the event rate relative to using primary production alone. We provide new SHiP sensitivity projections for dark photons and electrophilic gauge bosons, which are significantly improved compared to previous literature. The main gain in sensitivity occurs for long-lived dark vectors with masses below ~ 50 − 300 MeV. The dominant production mode in this parameter space is low-energy annihilation e+e− → V (γ). This motivates a detailed study of backgrounds and efficiencies in the SHiP experiment for sub-GeV signals.
Copyright and License
© The Authors. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits any use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited. Article funded by SCOAP3.
Acknowledgement
We thank P.A.N. Machado for collaboration in early stages of this work, and E. Nardi for detailed correspondences relating to atomic binding effects. We are also grateful to Stefania Gori for useful discussions, and Nicola Serra regarding energy thresholds at SHiP and the experiment’s updated nominally planned number of protons on target. We thank Phil Ilten and Yotam Soreq for helpful discussions, especially related to darkcast. We also thank Bhaskar Dutta and Adrian Thompson for valuable discussions and feedback on this manuscript. Part of this research was performed at the Aspen Center for Physics, which is supported by National Science Foundation grant PHY-1607611. RP is supported by the Neutrino Theory Network under Award Number DEAC02-07CH11359, the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of High Energy Physics under Award Number DE-SC0011632, and by the Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics. NB acknowledges the support of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC). This research was enabled in part by support provided by the BC DRI Group, Compute Ontario and the Digital Research Alliance of Canada (alliancecan.ca). The work of PJF was supported by Fermi Forward Discovery Group, LLC under Contract No. 89243024CSC000002 with the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of High Energy Physics.
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Additional details
- National Science Foundation
- PHY-1607611
- United States Department of Energy
- DEAC02-07CH11359
- United States Department of Energy
- DE-SC0011632
- California Institute of Technology
- Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics -
- Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council
- Digital Research Alliance of Canada
- Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
- 89243024CSC000002
- SCOAP3
- Accepted
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2025-01-19
- Available
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2025-02-18Published
- Caltech groups
- Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics, Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy (PMA)
- Publication Status
- Published