Potential for the discovery of the protophobic boson at the STCF

Abstract

We study the morphology of the main drift chamber (MDC) to be built around the collision point of the proposed Super tau-charm facility (STCF), to check its suitability for discovering the 17 MeV protophobic boson (X17 boson), hypothesised as a solution to the persistent ATOMKI nuclear-transition anomalies. Using the TrackEff framework, we perform detector-level simulations of the STCF MDC, and evaluate displaced-vertex sensitivities towards the protophobic boson, across the relevant mass-coupling parameter space. We study benchmark scenarios with visible and dark decay channels to perform likelihood-based significance estimates in order to determine the 5~$σ$ discovery reach for the protophobic boson. We find that STCF can potentially discover the protophobic boson while tolerating $\sim 10^4$ background events for specific regions of the parameter space. Our analysis establishes the first feasibility study of displaced light-boson searches at the STCF, motivating a full Geant-4 simulation.