Dark fluxes from electromagnetic cascades

Creators: Blinov, Nikita^{1, 2}; Fox, Patrick J.³; Kelly, Kevin J.^{4, 5}; Machado, Pedro A. N.³; Plestid, Ryan⁶

1. York University
2. University of Victoria
3. Fermilab
4. European Organization for Nuclear Research
5. Texas A&M University
6. California Institute of Technology

Abstract

We study dark sector production in electromagnetic (EM) cascades. This problem requires accurate simulations of Standard Model (SM) and dark sector processes, both of which impact angular and energy distributions of emitted particles that ultimately determine flux predictions in a downstream detector. We describe the minimal set of QED processes which must be included to faithfully reproduce a SM cascade, and identify a universal algorithm to generate a dark sector flux given a Monte-Carlo simulation of a SM shower. We provide a new tool, "Image missing", which simulates EM cascades with associated dark vector production, and compare it against existing literature and "off the shelf" tools. The signal predictions at downstream detectors can strongly depend on the nontrivial interplay (and modelling) of SM and dark sector processes, in particular multiple Coulomb scattering and positron annihilation. We comment on potential impacts of these effects for realistic experimental setups.

Copyright and License

© 2024, The Author(s). 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.

Acknowledgement

We thank Peter LePage for help with the Python implementation of VEGAS. We thank Adrian Thompson for helpful correspondences regarding the implementation of dark vector production in [44]. We thank Bhaskar Dutta, Wes Ketchum, Shirley Li, and Stephan Meighen-Berger for useful discussions, and Brian Batell for feedback on the manuscript. RP is supported by the Neutrino Theory Network under Award Number DE-AC02-07CHI11359, 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. PJF and PANM are supported 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. KJK is supported in part by DOE grant DE-SC0010813. NB was supported in part by NSERC, Canada. We used Package-X [90] and FeynCalc [91] to derive and check several analytic results in this work. Our numerical work was enabled by VEGAS [72, 73], numpy [92], scipy [93] and matplotlib [94].

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JHEP07(2024)022.pdf

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