A new way to search for light dark matter using beam-dump experiments

Scientists have developed a new way to detect light dark matter using beam-dump experiments, which crash high-energy beams of particles into targets, potentially creating dark matter particles.

This beam-dump experiments observe these dark matter particles in nearby neutrino detectors, allowing scientists to observe the decay of nuclei excited by the inelastic scattering of dark matter.

This is a different way of detecting dark matter than previous searches, and it has significantly better sensitivity. 

Depiction of beam-dump experiment

The method was published in APS Physical Review Letters on September 12, 2023.

The authors of the paper, Bhaskar Dutta, Wei-Chih Huang and Jayden Newstead , used existing data collected by neutrino experiments to set world-leading constraints on dark matter interacting with “dark photons”.

Dr Newstead is a member of the Dark Matter Centre and a researcher at The University of Melbourne.

With experimental improvements planned for the future, this new technique will become even more powerful. This is a significant step forward in the search for dark matter, and could help us to finally understand this mysterious substance.

Read the full article titled Probing the Dark Sector with Nuclear Transition Photons in APS Physical Review Letters.