Proton beam dumps are prolific sources of mesons enabling a powerful technique to search for vector mediator coupling of dark matter to neutral pion and higher mass meson decays. By the end of the decade the PIP-II linac will be delivering up to 1 MW of proton power to the FNAL campus. This includes a significant increase of power to the Booster Neutrino Beamline (BNB) which delivers 8 GeV protons to the Short Baseline Neutrino (SBN) detectors. By building a new dedicated beam dump target station, and using the SBN detectors, a greater than an order of magnitude increase in search sensitivity for dark matter relative to the recent MiniBooNE beam dump search can be achieved. This modest cost upgrade to the BNB would begin testing models of the highly motivated relic density limit predictions and provide novel ways to test explanations of the anomalous excess of low energy events seen by MiniBooNE.
@article{arxiv.2203.08102,
title = {SBN-BD: $\mathcal{O}$(10 GeV) Proton Beam Dump at Fermilab's PIP-II Linac},
author = {Matt Toups and R. G. Van de Water and Brian Batell and S. J. Brice and Patrick deNiverville and Jeff Eldred and A. Fava and Kevin J. Kelly and Tom Kobilarcik and W. C. Louis and Pedro A. N. Machado and Bill Pellico and Josh Spitz and Rex Tayloe and R. T. Thornton and Z. Pavlovic and Jaehoon Yu and J. Zettlemoyer},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2203.08102},
year = {2022}
}