Abstract: The (P) over bar ANDA (anti-Proton ANnihiliation at DArmstadt) experiment will be one of the four flagship experiments at the new international accelerator complex FAIR (Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research) in Darmstadt, Germany. (P) over bar ANDA will address fundamental questions of hadron physics and quantum chromodynamics using high-intensity cooled antiproton beams with momenta between 1.5 and 15 GeV/c and a design luminosity of up to 2 x 10(32) cm(-2) S-1. Excellent particle identification (PID) is crucial to the success of the (P) over bar ANDA physics program. Hadronic PID in the barrel region of the target spectrometer will be performed by a fast and compact Cherenkov counter using the detection of internally reflected Cherenkov light (DIRC) technology. It is designed to cover the polar angle range from 22 degrees to 140 degrees and will provide at least 3 standard deviations (s.d.) pi/K separation up to 3.5 GeV/c, matching the expected upper limit of the final state kaon momentum distribution from simulation. This documents describes the technical design and the expected performance of the (P) over bar ANDA Barrel DIRC detector. The design is based on the successful BaBar DIRC with several key improvements. The performance and system cost were optimized in detailed detector simulations and validated with full system prototypes using particle beams at GSI and CERN. The final design meets or exceeds the PID goal of clean pi/K separation with at least 3 s.d. over the entire phase space of charged kaons in the Barrel DIRC.

Abstract: Recently the XENON1T collaboration has released new results on searches for new physics in low-energy electronic recoils. The data shows an excess over background in the low-energy tail, particularly pronounced at about 2-3 keV. With an exposure of 0.65 tonne-year, large detection efficiency and energy resolution, the detector is sensitive as well to solar neutrino backgrounds, with the most prominent contribution given by pp neutrinos. We investigate whether such signal can be explained in terms of new neutrino interactions with leptons mediated by a light vector particle. We find that the excess is consistent with this interpretation for vector masses below less than or similar to 0.1 MeV. The region of parameter space probed by the XENON1T data is competitive with constraints from laboratory experiments, in particular GEMMA, Borexino and TEXONO. However we point out a severe tension with astrophysical bounds and cosmological observations.

Abstract: In addition to vector (V) type new particles extensively discussed previously, both CP-even (S) and CP-odd (P) spin-0 dark matter (DM) mediators can couple to muons and be produced in the bremsstrahlung reaction mu- + N -mu- + N + S(P). Their possible subsequent invisible decay into a pair of Dirac DM particles, S(P) -chi chi over bar , can be detected in fixed target experiments through missing energy signature. In this paper, we focus on the case of experiments using high-energy muon beams. For this reason, we derive the differential cross sections involved using the phase space Weiszacker-Williams approximation and compare them to the exact-tree-level calculations. The formalism derived can be applied in various experiments that could observe muon-spin-0 DM interactions. This can happen in present and future proton beam-dump experiments such as NA62, SHIP, HIKE, and SHADOWS; in muon fixed target experiments as NA64 mu, MUonE and M3; in neutrino experiments using powerful proton beams such as DUNE. In particular, we focus on the NA64 μexperiment case, which uses a 160 GeV muon beam at the CERN Super Proton Synchrotron accelerator. We compute the derived cross sections, the resulting signal yields and we discuss the experiment projected sensitivity to probe the relic DM parameter space and the (g – 2)mu anomaly favored region considering 1011 and 1013 muons on target.