Paper

Dark Matter Search in Nucleon, Pion, and Electron Channels from a Proton Beam Dump with MiniBooNE

Green, J A, Nienaber, P, Shaevitz, M H, Garvey, G T, R G Van de Water, Shahsavarani, S, Tayloe, R, Collaboration, MiniBooNE-DM, Perevalov, D, Liu, Q, White, D H, Cooper, R L, Grange, J, Thornton, R T, Chatterjee, A, deNiverville, P, Backfish, M, Bashyal, A, Moore, C D, Aguilar-Arevalo, A A, d, R, Kobilarcik, T, Taylor, C, Brown, B C, Wester, W, Mills, G B, Roe, B P, Djurcic, Z, Louis, W C, Carr, R, Pavlovic, Z, E -C Huang, Stancu, I, Garcia, F G, Katori, T, Dharmapalan, R, J Yu, Ray, H, Huelsnitz, W, Marsh, W, Batell, B, Mirabal, J, I L de Icaza Astiz, Ketchum, W, Karagiorgi, G

2018

Overview

A search for sub-GeV dark matter produced from collisions of the Fermilab 8 GeV Booster protons with a steel beam dump was performed by the MiniBooNE-DM collaboration using data from \\(1.86 \\times 10^{20}\\) protons on target in a dedicated run. The MiniBooNE detector, consisting of 818 tonnes of mineral oil and located 490 meters downstream of the beam dump, is sensitive to a variety of dark matter initiated scattering reactions. Three dark matter interactions are considered for this analysis: elastic scattering off nucleons, inelastic neutral pion production, and elastic scattering off electrons. Multiple data sets were used to constrain flux and systematic errors, and time-of-flight information was employed to increase sensitivity to higher dark matter masses. No excess from the background predictions was observed, and 90\\(\\%\\) confidence level limits were set on the vector portal and leptophobic dark matter models. New parameter space is excluded in the vector portal dark matter model with a dark matter mass between 5 and 50 MeV c\\(^{-2}\\).

• Publisher: Cornell University Library, arXiv.org
• Subject: Confidence intervals / Dark matter / Elastic analysis / Elastic scattering / Inelastic scattering / Measuring instruments / Mineral oils / Nucleons / Proton beams / Systematic errors