Scattering of Dark Particles with Light Mediators

Soper, Davison E.; Spannowsky, Michael; Wallace, Christopher; Tait, Tim M.P.

doi:10.1103/physrevd.90.115005

Scattering of Dark Particles with Light Mediators

Soper, Davison E.; Spannowsky, Michael; Wallace, Christopher; Tait, Tim M.P.

Authors

Davison E. Soper

Professor Michael Spannowsky michael.spannowsky@durham.ac.uk
Director

Christopher Wallace

Tim M.P. Tait

Abstract

We present a treatment of the high energy scattering of dark Dirac fermions from nuclei, mediated by the exchange of a light vector boson. The dark fermions are produced by proton-nucleus interactions in a fixed target and, after traversing shielding that screens out strongly interacting products, appear similarly to neutrino neutral current scattering in a detector. Using the Fermilab experiment E613 as an example, we place limits on a secluded dark matter scenario. Visible scattering in the detector includes both the familiar regime of large momentum transfer to the nucleus (Q2) described by deeply inelastic scattering, as well as small Q2 kinematics described by the exchanged vector mediator fluctuating into a quark-antiquark pair whose interaction with the nucleus is described by a saturation model. We find that the improved description of the low Q2 scattering leads to important corrections, resulting in more robust constraints in a regime where a description entirely in terms of deeply inelastic scattering cannot be trusted.

Citation

Soper, D. E., Spannowsky, M., Wallace, C., & Tait, T. M. (2014). Scattering of Dark Particles with Light Mediators. Physical Review D, 90(11), Article 115005. https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevd.90.115005

Journal Article Type	Article
Publication Date	Dec 3, 2014
Deposit Date	Dec 12, 2014
Publicly Available Date	Apr 27, 2015
Journal	Physical Review D
Print ISSN	1550-7998
Electronic ISSN	1550-2368
Publisher	American Physical Society
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	90
Issue	11
Article Number	115005
DOI	https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevd.90.115005

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