Testing Meson Portal Dark Sector Solutions to the MiniBooNE Anomaly at CCM
Abstract
A solution to the MiniBooNE excess invoking rare three-body decays of the charged pions and kaons to new states in the MeV mass scale was recently proposed as a dark-sector explanation. This class of solution illuminates the fact that, while the charged pions were focused in the target-mode run, their decay products were isotropically suppressed in the beam-dump-mode run in which no excess was observed. This suggests a new physics solution correlated to the mesonic sector. We investigate an extended set of phenomenological models that can explain the MiniBooNE excess as a dark sector solution, utilizing long-lived particles that might be produced in the three-body decays of the charged mesons and the two-body anomalous decays of the neutral mesons. Over a broad set of interactions with the long-lived particles, we show that these scenarios can be compatible with constraints from LSND, KARMEN, and MicroBooNE, and evaluate the sensitivity of the ongoing and future data taken by the Coherent CAPTAIN Mills experiment (CCM) to a potential discovery in this parameter space. See addendum for updated predictions for future MicroBooNE sensitivity.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2309.02599,
title = {Testing Meson Portal Dark Sector Solutions to the MiniBooNE Anomaly at CCM},
author = {A. A. Aguilar-Arevalo and S. Biedron and J. Boissevain and M. Borrego and L. Bugel and M. Chavez-Estrada and J. M. Conrad and R. L. Cooper and A. Diaz and J. R. Distel and J. C. D'Olivo and E. Dunton and B. Dutta and D. Fields and J. R. Gochanour and M. Gold and E. Guardincerri and E. C. Huang and N. Kamp and D. Kim and K. Knickerbocker and W. C. Louis and J. T. M. Lyles and R. Mahapatra and S. Maludze and J. Mirabal and D. Newmark and P. deNiverville and V. Pandey and D. Poulson and H. Ray and E. Renner and T. J. Schaub and A. Schneider and M. H. Shaevitz and D. Smith and W. Sondheim and A. M. Szelc and C. Taylor and A. Thompson and W. H. Thompson and M. Tripathi and R. T. Thornton and R. Van Berg and R. G. Van de Water},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2309.02599},
year = {2024}
}
Comments
Addendum (in preparation for PRD) appended with forecast for MicroBooNE sensitivity to the MiniBooNE excess. Added reference to open source code for simulation of the horn-focused charged mesons