Sensitivity of an Early Dark Matter Search using the Electromagnetic Calorimeter as a Target for the Light Dark Matter eXperiment

Abstract

The Light Dark Matter eXperiment (LDMX) is proposed to employ a thin tungsten target and a multi-GeV electron beam to carry out a missing momentum search for the production of dark matter candidate particles. We study the sensitivity for a complementary missing-energy-based search using the LDMX Electromagnetic Calorimeter as an active target with a focus on early running. In this context, we construct an event selection from a limited set of variables that projects sensitivity into previously-unexplored regions of light dark matter phase space -- down to an effective dark photon interaction strength $y$ of approximately $2\times10^{-13}$ ($5\times10^{-12}$) for a 1MeV (10MeV) dark matter candidate mass.