Probing millicharged particles at an electron beam dump with ultralow-threshold sensors
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1.
Stony Brook University
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2.
University of Minnesota
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3.
California Institute of Technology
Abstract
We propose to search for millicharged particles produced in high-intensity electron beam dumps using small ultralow-threshold sensors. As a concrete example, we consider a Skipper-CCD placed behind the beam dump in Hall A at Jefferson Lab. We compute the millicharged particle flux, including both electromagnetic cascade and meson productions emanating from an aluminum target. We find that the sensitivity of a modest 2 × 14 array of Skipper-CCDs can exceed the sensitivity of all existing searches for millicharged particle masses below 1.5 GeV, and is either competitive or world leading when compared to other proposed experiments. Our results demonstrate that small-scale ultralow threshold silicon devices can enhance the reach of accelerator-based experiments, while fitting comfortably within existing experimental halls.
Copyright and License (English)
© 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 (English)
We thank Duncan Adams for helpful conversations related to neutron backgrounds, Marco Battaglieri for helpful correspondence about the BDX detector, Christopher Hill for correspondences on the SUBMET experiment, Javier Tiffenberg for useful comments on CCD readout and cosmic-ray induced backgrounds, and Kevin Zhou for helpful discussions about vector meson photoproduction.
Funding (English)
RE acknowledges support from DOE Grant DE-SC0025309, Simons Investigator in Physics Award 623940, Heising-Simons Foundation Grant No. 79921, Binational Science Foundation Grant No. 2020220. MD and HX are supported in part by DOE Grant DE-SC0009854 and Simons Investigator in Physics Award 623940. In addition, HX is supported in part by the Binational Science Foundation Grant No. 2020220. PL and ZL are supported in part by the DOE Grant No. DE-SC0011842 and a Sloan Research Fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation at the University of Minnesota. 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.
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JHEP04(2025)057.pdf
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Additional details
Related works
- Is new version of
- Discussion Paper: arXiv:2412.09652 (arXiv)
Funding
- United States Department of Energy
- DE-SC0025309
- Simons Foundation
- 623940
- United States-Israel Binational Science Foundation
- 2020220
- United States Department of Energy
- DE-SC0009854
- United States Department of Energy
- DE-SC0011842
- Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
- United States Department of Energy
- DEAC02-07CH11359
- United States Department of Energy
- DE-SC0011632
- SCOAP3
Dates
- Accepted
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2025-03-07
- Available
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2025-04-08Published online