Title: Searching for Light Dark Matter with Fixed Target Neutrino Experiments

Abstract:

There is a compelling array of evidence supporting the existence of dark matter, a non-baryonic source of mass that dominates the matter density of the universe. However, details of its particle nature remains incredibly elusive, as it has evaded unambiguous detection by any non-gravitational search. We consider a model of light (sub-GeV) WIMP dark matter that escapes many of the bounds placed by current dark matter searches. Such low mass dark matter candidates, if produced as a thermal relic in the early universe, must be accompanied by light mediators in order to reproduce the dark matter abundance observed in the present day universe. These light mediators in turn provide a new channel for the production of dark matter at fixed target neutrino experiments such as MiniBooNE, COHERENT and CENNS, and beam dump experiments like SHiP.  The resulting relativistic dark matter beam could be detected through neutral-current-like interactions in detectors sensitive to relativistic neutrinos. These experiments have been found to provide some of the best limits on the sub-GeV dark matter parameter space.