DUNE potential for sub-GeV dark matter in proton beam dump mode

Abstract

DUNE with its cutting edge technology is designed to study the neutrino science and proton decay physics. This facility can be further exploited for the study of the ground breaking discoveries i.e. origin of matter, unification of forces, dark matter detection etc. In this work we have explored the DUNE potential for capturing the sub-GeV dark matter in viable dark matter parameter space. The scenario of sub-GeV dark matter range requires a light mediator that couples the hidden sector with the standard model. The choice of the mediator will decide the different channels by which dark matter candidates can be produced. Here three channels $\pi^{0}/\eta$-decay, proton bremsstrahlung and parton-level production modes are considered for the production of dark matter with a 120 GeV proton beam facility placed at Fermi lab. To overcome the neutrino background we have used beam dump mode for the production of pure dark matter beam. To explore the new region of parameter space of dark matter at DUNE the elastic scattering of dark matter beam with electrons and nucleons are studied. In terms of DUNE potential for capturing dark matter signatures the dark matter yield results at DUNE (in our work) shows a significant improvement over existing dark matter probes i.e. BaBar, E137, LSND, MiniBooNE, T2K etc.