Current status and future prospects for the Light Dark Matter eXperiment

T Åkesson, N Blinov, L Brand-Baugher, C Bravo… - arXiv preprint arXiv …, 2022 - arxiv.org
T Åkesson, N Blinov, L Brand-Baugher, C Bravo, LK Bryngemark, P Butti, C Doglioni
arXiv preprint arXiv:2203.08192, 2022arxiv.org
The constituents of dark matter are still unknown, and the viable possibilities span a vast
range of masses. The physics community has established searching for sub-GeV dark
matter as a high priority and identified accelerator-based experiments as an essential facet
of this search strategy. A key goal of the accelerator-based dark matter program is testing the
broad idea of thermally produced sub-GeV dark matter through experiments designed to
directly produce dark matter particles. The most sensitive way to search for the production of …
The constituents of dark matter are still unknown, and the viable possibilities span a vast range of masses. The physics community has established searching for sub-GeV dark matter as a high priority and identified accelerator-based experiments as an essential facet of this search strategy. A key goal of the accelerator-based dark matter program is testing the broad idea of thermally produced sub-GeV dark matter through experiments designed to directly produce dark matter particles. The most sensitive way to search for the production of light dark matter is to use a primary electron beam to produce it in fixed-target collisions. The Light Dark Matter eXperiment (LDMX) is an electron-beam fixed-target missing-momentum experiment that realizes this approach and provides unique sensitivity to light dark matter in the sub-GeV range. This contribution provides an overview of the theoretical motivation, the main experimental challenges, how LDMX addresses these challenges, and projected sensitivities. We further describe the capabilities of LDMX to explore other interesting new and standard physics, such as visibly-decaying axion and vector mediators or rare meson decays, and to provide timely electronuclear scattering measurements that will inform the modeling of neutrino-nucleus scattering for DUNE.
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