A High Efficiency Photon Veto for the Light Dark Matter eXperiment

Abstract

Fixed-target experiments using primary electron beams can be powerful discovery tools for light dark matter in the sub-GeV mass range. The Light Dark Matter eXperiment (LDMX) is designed to measure missing momentum in high-rate electron fixed-target reactions with beam energies of 4 GeV to 16 GeV. A prerequisite for achieving several important sensitivity milestones is the capability to efficiently reject backgrounds associated with few-GeV bremsstrahlung, by twelve orders of magnitude, while maintaining high efficiency for signal. The primary challenge arises from events with photo-nuclear reactions faking the missing-momentum property of a dark matter signal. We present a methodology developed for the LDMX detector concept that is capable of the required rejection. By employing a detailed GEANT4-based model of the detector response, we demonstrate that the sampling calorimetry proposed for LDMX can achieve better than $10textasciicircum-13$ rejection of few-GeV photons. This suggests that the luminosity-limited sensitivity of LDMX can be realized at 4 GeV and higher beam energies.

Publication
arXiv:1912.05535 [hep-ex, physics:hep-ph, physics:physics]

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