Speaker
Description
The MiniBooNE experiment at Fermilab performed the first dedicated search for accelerator proton beam produced dark matter. By steering the 8 GeV beam into an iron beam dump, the neutrino production from charged meson decay was suppressed while the photon production from neutral mesons remained unchanged. According to hidden-sector vector portal models, the Standard Model photons kinetically mix with dark photons that decay into dark matter and travel towards the MiniBooNE detector.
The experiment looked for dark matter particles scattering elastically off of nucleons in the detector medium and set new limits for the existence of sub-GeV dark matter within a vector portal model. In this talk, the experimental setup, analysis methods and ongoing analyses will be discussed. The results from MiniBooNE show that Fermilab could be at the forefront of searches for sub-GeV dark matter.
