The bremsstrahlung-like production of the massive spin-2 dark matter mediator

Abstract

The link between Standard Model (SM) particles and dark matter (DM) can be introduced via spin-2 massive mediator, G, that couples to photon and charged leptons. Moreover, in a mediator mass range from sub-MeV to sub-GeV, fixed-target facilities such as NA64e, LDMX, NA64$\mu$, M$^3$, and E137, can potentially probe such particle of the hidden sector via the signatures that are described by the bremsstrahlung-like process involving tensor mediator. We compare numerically the Weizsaker-Williams (WW) approximation and the exact tree-level (ETL) approach for the bremsstrahlung-like mediator production cross section by choosing various parameters of the fixed-target experiments. In addition, we derive novel constraints on spin-2 DM mediator parameter space from the data of the E137 fixed-target experiment. In particular, we demonstrate that the E137 experiment has been ruled out the the couplings of the spin-2 mediator at the level of $8\times10^{-8}~\mbox{GeV}^{-1}~\lesssim~c^{\rm G}_{ee}~\lesssim~10^{-5}~\mbox{GeV}^{-1}$ for the typical masses in the range $100~\mbox{MeV}~\lesssim~m_{\rm G}~\lesssim 800~\mbox{MeV}$, that corresponds to the statistics of $1.87\times 10^{20}$ electrons accumulated on target. The latter implies its universal coupling to photons and leptons, $c^{\rm G}_{ee} = c^{\rm G}_{\gamma \gamma}$.