Search prospects for axionlike particles at rare nuclear isotope accelerator facilities

Abstract

We propose a novel experimental scheme, called DAMSA (Dump-produced Aboriginal Matter Searches at an Accelerator), for searching for dark-sector particles, using rare nuclear isotope accelerator facilities that provide high-flux proton beams to produce a large number of rare nuclear isotopes. The high-intensity nature of their beams enables the investigation of dark-sector particles, including axionlike particles (ALPs) and dark photons. By contrast, their typical beam energies are not large enough to produce the backgrounds such as neutrinos resulting from secondary charged particles. The detector of DAMSA is then placed immediate downstream of the proton beam dump to maximize the prompt decay signals of dark-sector particles, which are often challenging to probe in other beam-dump-type experiments featuring a longer baseline, at the expense of an enormous amount of the beam-related neutron background. We demonstrate that beam-related neutrons can be significantly suppressed if the signal accompanies multiple, correlated visible particles in the final state. We show that the close proximity of the detector to the ALP production dump makes it possible to probe a high-mass region of ALP parameter space that the existing experiments have never explored.