CaltechAUTHORS
Published December 2025 | Version Published
Journal Article Open

Sensitivity of an early dark matter search using the electromagnetic calorimeter as a target for the Light Dark Matter eXperiment

Creators

  • 1. ROR icon Lund University
  • 2. ROR icon Stanford University
  • 3. ROR icon SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
  • 4. ROR icon University of California, Santa Barbara
  • 5. ROR icon University of Virginia
  • 6. ROR icon Carnegie Mellon University
  • 7. ROR icon California Institute of Technology
  • 8. ROR icon University of Minnesota
  • 9. ROR icon University of Michigan–Ann Arbor
  • 10. ROR icon Fermilab

Abstract

The Light Dark Matter eXperiment (LDMX) is proposed to employ a thin tungsten target and a multi-GeV electron beam to carry out a missing momentum search for the production of dark matter candidate particles. We study the sensitivity for a complementary missing-energy-based search using the LDMX Electromagnetic Calorimeter as an active target with a focus on early running. In this context, we construct an event selection from a limited set of variables that projects sensitivity into previously-unexplored regions of light dark matter phase space — down to an effective dark photon interaction strength y of approximately 2 × 10−13 (5 × 10−12) for a 1 MeV (10 MeV) dark matter candidate mass.

Copyright and License

© The Authors. Article funded by SCOAP3. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits any use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.

Acknowledgement

Support for UCSB is made possible by the Joe and Pat Yzurdiaga endowed chair in experimental science. Use was made of the UCSB computational facilities administered by the Center for Scientific Computing at the California NanoSystems Institute and Materials Research Laboratory (an NSF MRSEC; DMR-1720256) and purchased through NSF CNS-1725797, and from resources provided by the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing at the Centre for Scientific and Technical Computing at Lund University (LUNARC), as well as LUNARC’s own infrastructure. Contributions from Caltech, CMU, Stanford, TTU, UMN, UVA, and UCSB are supported by the US Department of Energy under grants DE-SC0011925, DE-SC0010118, DE-SC0022083, DE-SC0015592, DE-SC00012069, DE-SC0007838, and DE-SC0011702, respectively. Support for Lund University is made possible by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg foundation (project grant Light Dark Matter, Dnr. KAW 2019.0080), and by the Crafoord foundation (Dnr 20190875) and the Royal Physiographic Society of Lund. RP acknowledges support through the L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science in Sweden Prize with support of the Young Academy of Sweden, and from the Swedish Research Council (Dnr 2019-03436). LB acknowledges support from the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation Postdoctoral Scholarship Program at Stanford (Dnr. KAW 2018.0429). JE, GK, CH, WK, CMS, and NT are supported by the Fermi Research Alliance, LLC under Contract No. DE-AC02-07CH11359 with the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of High Energy Physics and the Fermilab LDRD program. CB, PB, OM, TN, PS, and NT are supported by Stanford University under Contract No. DE-AC02-76SF00515 with the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of High Energy Physics.

Files

JHEP12(2025)150.pdf

Files (472.7 kB)

Name Size
md5:a7c43d764c108b86bf4f22e7e47cbbd5
472.7 kB Preview Download

Additional details

Related works

Is new version of
Discussion Paper: arXiv:2508.08121 (arXiv)

Funding

National Science Foundation
DMR-1720256
National Science Foundation
CNS-1725797
U.S. Department of Energy
DE-SC0011925
U.S. Department of Energy
DE-SC0010118
U.S. Department of Energy
DE-SC0022083
U.S. Department of Energy
DE-SC0015592
U.S. Department of Energy
DE-SC00012069
U.S. Department of Energy
DE-SC0007838
U.S. Department of Energy
DE-SC0011702
Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation
KAW 2019.0080
Crafoord Foundation
20190875
Royal Physiographic Society of Lund
Swedish Research Council
2019-03436
Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation
KAW 2018.0429
U.S. Department of Energy
DE-AC02-07CH11359
U.S. Department of Energy
DE-AC02-76SF00515
SCOAP3

Dates

Submitted
2025-08-12
Accepted
2025-10-28
Available
2025-12-19
Published

Caltech Custom Metadata

Caltech groups
Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy (PMA) , Physics Department
Publication Status
Published