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  • Letter
  • Open Access

Search prospects for axionlike particles at rare nuclear isotope accelerator facilities

Wooyoung Jang1,*, Doojin Kim2,†, Kyoungchul Kong3,‡, Youngjoon Kwon4,§, Jong-Chul Park5,11,∥, Min Sang Ryu6,7,¶, Seodong Shin8,**, Richard G. Van de Water9,††, Un-Ki Yang10,‡‡ et al.

Jaehoon Yu1,§§

  • 1Department of Physics, University of Texas, Arlington, Texas 76019, USA
  • 2Mitchell Institute for Fundamental Physics and Astronomy, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas 77843, USA
  • 3Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas 66045, USA
  • 4Department of Physics and IPAP, Yonsei University, Seoul 03722, Republic of Korea
  • 5Department of Physics and IQS, Chungnam National University, Daejeon 34134, Republic of Korea
  • 6Department of Physics, University of Seoul, Seoul 02504, Republic of Korea
  • 7Center for High Energy Physics, Kyoungpook National University, Daegu 41566, Republic of Korea
  • 8Department of Physics, Jeonbuk National University, Jeonju, Jeonbuk 54896, Republic of Korea
  • 9Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, New Mexico 87545, USA
  • 10Department of Physics, Seoul National University, Seoul 08826, Republic of Korea
  • 11Center for Theoretical Physics of the Universe (CTPU), Institute for Basic Science (IBS), Daejeon 34126, Republic of Korea

  • *wooyoung.jang@uta.edu
  • †doojin.kim@tamu.edu
  • ‡kckong@ku.edu
  • §yjkwon63@yonsei.ac.kr
  • ∥jcpark@cnu.ac.kr
  • mryu93@gmail.com
  • **sshin@jbnu.ac.kr
  • ††vdwater@lanl.gov
  • ‡‡ukyang@snu.ac.kr
  • §§jaehoon@uta.edu
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Phys. Rev. D 107, L031901 – Published 7 February, 2023

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.107.L031901

Abstract

We propose a novel experimental scheme, called DAMSA (Dump-produced Aboriginal Matter Searches at an Accelerator), for searching for dark-sector particles, using rare nuclear isotope accelerator facilities that provide high-flux proton beams to produce a large number of rare nuclear isotopes. The high-intensity nature of their beams enables the investigation of dark-sector particles, including axionlike particles (ALPs) and dark photons. By contrast, their typical beam energies are not large enough to produce the backgrounds such as neutrinos resulting from secondary charged particles. The detector of DAMSA is then placed immediate downstream of the proton beam dump to maximize the prompt decay signals of dark-sector particles, which are often challenging to probe in other beam-dump-type experiments featuring a longer baseline, at the expense of an enormous amount of the beam-related neutron background. We demonstrate that beam-related neutrons can be significantly suppressed if the signal accompanies multiple, correlated visible particles in the final state. We show that the close proximity of the detector to the ALP production dump makes it possible to probe a high-mass region of ALP parameter space that the existing experiments have never explored.

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Phys. Rev. D 107, L031901– Published 7 February, 2023
  • Received 5 September 2022
  • Accepted 31 December 2022
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