Hunting sub-GeV dark matter with the NOν A near detector

Abstract

© 2019 authors. Published by the American Physical Society. We study the sensitivity of the NOνA near detector to MeV-GeV dark matter while operating symbiotically with the neutrino program. We find that NOνA could explore a large new region of parameter space over the next few years for dark matter masses below 100 MeV, reaching the thermal target for a scalar dark matter particle for some masses. This result represents a significant improvement over existing probes such as BABAR, E137, MiniBooNE, and LSND