Light Mass WIMP Searches with a Neutrino Experiment: A REquest for Further MiniBooNE Running.

摘要

MiniBooNE has been designed to search for neutrino oscillations at the LSND mass scale. Running since 2002 in both neutrino and antineutrino mode, MiniBooNE has successfully accomplished these primary goals and produced evidence that supports the claims of LSND oscillations. Being a one detector oscillations experiment, its systematic uncertainties now nearly dominate the total measurement error, therefore, more statistics in either neutrino or antineutrino mode do not significantly add new information to the question of oscillations. Recent theoretical work has intensified and highlighted the low mass (< 200 MeV) weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP) sector as a good place to look for the dark matter in the Universe. The MiniBooNE experiment was designed to produce a significant flux of neutrinos with a large number of protons impacting a Beryllium target, and then detecting them with a large volume electromagnetic sensitive detector at short distance (500 m). It turns out that with some tweaking of the beam configuration, i.e. steering the proton beam past the target and deploying the 25m absorber, this is an ideal setup to search for low mass WIMPs in a parameter space that overlaps with the muon g-2 anomaly and cosmological relic density estimates.