Speaker
Description
Spallation neutron sources can provide an intense source of new, light particles from the decay at rest of pions, muons, and kaons.
Considering a variety of spallation sources around the world, we study the sensitivity of existing neutrino detectors to the decay of these new particles.
At J-PARC, we show that the fast, magnetized, gaseous argon chambers of the ND280 detector could place leading limits on light particles decaying to $e^+e^-$ and that the liquid-scintillator detectors of the J-PARC Sterile Neutrino Search at the JSNS (JSNS$^2$) experiment can exploit double- and triple-coincidence signals from $\mu^+\mu^-$ and $\pi^+\pi^-$ to place new limits on heavy neutral leptons.
At Oak Ridge, we show that the suite of detectors at the COHERENT experiment, despite their smaller size, would also have world-leading sensitivity to axion-like-particles and muonphilic light scalars.
We also discuss new opportunities for Coherent Captain Mills at Los Alamos and compare our results to on-going searches at the Short-Baseline Neutrino Program at Fermilab.
Spallation sources have the potential to explore more than an order of magnitude beyond current constraints in some new physics models, encouraging further study on data acquisition and background rejection by experimental collaborations.
