Probing invisible dark photon models via atmospheric collisions

Abstract

Atmospheric collisions can copiously produce dark sector particles in the invisible dark photon model, leading to detectable signals in underground neutrino detectors. We consider the dark photon model with the mass mixing mechanism and use the Super-K detector to detect the electron recoil events caused by the atmospherically produced dark sector particles within the model. We find that the combined data from four Super-K runs yield new leading constraints for the invisible dark photon in the mass range of $\sim (0.5-1.4)$ GeV, surpassing various previous constraints, including those from BaBar and NA64.

Comments: v1: 6 pages, 2 figures; v2: NA60 constraints added