Abstract
The exquisite capabilities of liquid Argon Time Projection Chambers make them ideal to search for weakly interacting particles in Beyond the Standard Model scenarios. Given their location at CERN the ProtoDUNE detectors may be exposed to a flux of such particles, produced in the collisions of 400 GeV protons (extracted from the Super Proton Synchrotron accelerator) on a target. Here we point out the interesting possibilities that such a setup offers to search for both long-lived unstable particles (Heavy Neutral Leptons, axion-like particles, etc) and stable particles (e.g. light dark matter, or millicharged particles). Our results show that, under conservative assumptions regarding the expected luminosity, this setup has the potential to improve over present bounds for some of the scenarios considered. This could be done within a short timescale, using facilities that are already in place at CERN, and without interfering with the experimental program in the North Area at CERN.
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Acknowledgments
We are very grateful to Nikolaos Charitonidis, Sylvain Girod and Vincent Clerc from the CERN BE-EA group for very useful discussions and insights on the SPS North Area layout and H2/H4 beamlines configurations. We warmly thank Paolo Crivelli and Sergei Gninenko for very useful discussions. We also warmly thank Francesco Pietropaolo for his useful feedback and reading of the manuscript, and Sara Bianco for pointing out an inconsistency in one of our plots in a previous version of the manuscript. This work has received partial support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 860881-HIDDeN and the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Staff Exchange grant agreement No 101086085 — ASYMMETRY. PC acknowledges partial financial support by the Spanish Research Agency (Agencia Estatal de Investigación) through the grant IFT Centro de Excelencia Severo Ochoa No CEX2020-001007-S and by the grant PID2019-108892RB-I00 funded by MCIN/AEI/ 10.13039/501100011033. She is also supported by Grant RYC2018-024240-I, funded by MCIN/AEI/ 10.13039/501100011033 and by “ESF Investing in your future”. JLP and SU acknowledge support from Generalitat Valenciana through the plan GenT program (CIDEGENT/2018/019) and from the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovacion through the project PID2020-113644GB-I00. JLP also acknowledges financial support by the Spanish Research Agency (Agencia Estatal de Investigación) through the project CNS2022-136013. The work of LMB is supported by SNSF Grant No. 186158 (Switzerland), RyC-030551-I, and PID2021-123955NA-100 funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033/FEDER, UE (Spain). The authors acknowledge use of the HPC facilities at the IFIC (SOM cluster) and at the IFT (Hydra Cluster).
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Coloma, P., López-Pavón, J., Molina-Bueno, L. et al. New physics searches using ProtoDUNE and the CERN SPS accelerator. J. High Energ. Phys. 2024, 134 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP01(2024)134
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP01(2024)134