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A high efficiency photon veto for the Light Dark Matter eXperiment

Journal of High Energy Physics volume 2020, Article number: 3 (2020) Cite this article

Abstract

Fixed-target experiments using primary electron beams can be powerful discovery tools for light dark matter in the sub-GeV mass range. The Light Dark Matter eXperiment (LDMX) is designed to measure missing momentum in high-rate electron fixed-target reactions with beam energies of 4 GeV to 16 GeV. A prerequisite for achieving several important sensitivity milestones is the capability to efficiently reject backgrounds associated with few-GeV bremsstrahlung, by twelve orders of magnitude, while maintaining high efficiency for signal. The primary challenge arises from events with photo-nuclear reactions faking the missing-momentum property of a dark matter signal. We present a methodology developed for the LDMX detector concept that is capable of the required rejection. By employing a detailed Geant4-based model of the detector response, we demonstrate that the sampling calorimetry proposed for LDMX can achieve better than 10−13 rejection of few-GeV photons. This suggests that the luminosity-limited sensitivity of LDMX can be realized at 4 GeV and higher beam energies.

A preprint version of the article is available at ArXiv.

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Affiliations

  1. Lund University, Department of Physics, Box 118, 221 00, Lund, Sweden

    Torsten Åkesson, Geoffrey Mullier & Ruth Pöttgen

  2. Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Batavia, IL, 60510, USA

    Nikita Blinov, Gordan Krnjaic & Nhan Tran

  3. Stanford University, Stanford, CA, 94305, USA

    Lene Bryngemark

  4. University of California at Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, USA

    Owen Colegrove, Giulia Collura, Valentina Dutta, Joseph Incandela, Juan Lazaro, Amina Li, Phillip Masterson, Akshay Nagar, Gavin Niendorf & Harrison Siegel

  5. University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, 22904, USA

    Craig Dukes & Craig Group

  6. California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, 91125, USA

    Bertrand Echenard, David G. Hitlin & James Oyang

  7. University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, 55455, USA

    Thomas Eichlersmith, Joshua Hiltbrand, Jeremiah Mans & Reese Petersen

  8. SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Menlo Park, CA, 94025, USA

    Jeremy McCormick, Omar Moreno, Timothy Nelson, Philip Schuster & Natalia Toro

  9. Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX, 79409, USA

    Andrew Whitbeck

Authors
  1. Torsten Åkesson
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  2. Nikita Blinov
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  3. Lene Bryngemark
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  4. Owen Colegrove
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  5. Giulia Collura
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  6. Craig Dukes
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  7. Valentina Dutta
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  8. Bertrand Echenard
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  9. Thomas Eichlersmith
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  10. Craig Group
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  11. Joshua Hiltbrand
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  12. David G. Hitlin
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  13. Joseph Incandela
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  14. Gordan Krnjaic
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  15. Juan Lazaro
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  16. Amina Li
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  17. Jeremiah Mans
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  18. Phillip Masterson
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  19. Jeremy McCormick
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  20. Omar Moreno
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  21. Geoffrey Mullier
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  22. Akshay Nagar
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  23. Timothy Nelson
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  24. Gavin Niendorf
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  25. James Oyang
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  26. Reese Petersen
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  27. Ruth Pöttgen
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  28. Philip Schuster
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  29. Harrison Siegel
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  30. Natalia Toro
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  31. Nhan Tran
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  32. Andrew Whitbeck
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Consortia

The LDMX collaboration

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Omar Moreno.

Additional information

ArXiv ePrint: 1912.05535

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Cite this article

The LDMX collaboration., Åkesson, T., Blinov, N. et al. A high efficiency photon veto for the Light Dark Matter eXperiment. J. High Energ. Phys. 2020, 3 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP04(2020)003

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Keywords

  • Beyond Standard Model
  • Dark matter
  • Fixed target experiments