Sensitivity of the MicroBooNE experiment to dark trident interactions

UNSPECIFIED (2022) Sensitivity of the MicroBooNE experiment to dark trident interactions. Other. UNSPECIFIED.

Abstract

This note describes an ongoing search for dark tridents in the MicroBooNE detector. The dark trident interaction is a proposed interaction of sub-GeV dark matter with ordinary matter that would allow an exploration of a hidden dark sector composed of a dark scalar or fermion χ and ′ a dark photon A . This dark matter candidate can be produced at fixed-target neutrino beams such as the NuMI beam and travel uninterrupted to the MicroBooNE liquid argon detector. The ′ interaction with the liquid argon occurs through the process χ + Ar → χ + Ar + A where the dark ′ photon promptly decays inside the detector through: A → e+ + e− . Two event selection strategies are explored, one using boosted decision trees and the other one applying a convolutional neural network. For both analyses a projected sensitivity in MicroBooNE after 2 × 1021 protons on target is presented.