Search for hadronic decays of feebly-interacting particles at NA62

The NA62 collaboration Cortina Gil, Eduardo ; Jerhot, Jan ; Lurkin, Nicolas ; et al.
CERN-EP-2025-012, 2025.
Inspire Record 2877075 DOI 10.17182/hepdata.156981

The NA62 experiment at CERN has the capability to collect data in a beam-dump mode, where 400 GeV protons are dumped on an absorber. In this configuration, New Physics particles, including dark photons, dark scalars, and axion-like particles, may be produced in the absorber and decay in the instrumented volume beginning approximately 80 m downstream of the dump. A search for these particles decaying in flight to hadronic final states is reported, based on an analysis of a sample of $1.4 \times 10^{17}$ protons on dump collected in 2021. No evidence of a New Physics signal is observed, excluding new regions of parameter spaces of multiple models.

66 data tables

90% CL upper limit in dark photon coupling vs mass parameter space for combined di-lepton and hadronic final states, using bremsstrahlung production without the time-like form factor.

90% CL upper limit in dark photon coupling vs mass parameter space for combined di-lepton and hadronic final states, including mixing and bremsstrahlung production with a time-like form factor.

90% CL upper limit in dark scalar coupling vs mass parameter space for combined di-lepton and hadronic final states.

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Version 2
Measurement of the $K^+\to\pi^+\gamma\gamma$ decay

The NA62 collaboration Cortina Gil, Eduardo ; Minucci, Elisa ; Padolski, Sergey ; et al.
Phys.Lett.B 850 (2024) 138513, 2024.
Inspire Record 2718968 DOI 10.17182/hepdata.147259

A sample of 3984 candidates of the $K^+\to\pi^+\gamma\gamma$ decay, with an estimated background of $291\pm14$ events, was collected by the NA62 experiment at CERN during 2017-2018. In order to describe the observed di-photon mass spectrum, the next-to-leading order contribution in chiral perturbation theory was found to be necessary. The decay branching ratio in the full kinematic range is measured to be $(9.61\pm0.17)\times10^{-7}$. The first search for production and prompt decay of an axion-like particle with gluon coupling in the process $K^+\to\pi^+a$, $a\to\gamma\gamma$ is also reported.

10 data tables

See caption of Figure 6.

See caption of Figure 6.

Upper limits at 90% CL of $B(K^+\to\pi^+a)\times B(a\to\gamma\gamma)$ in the prompt ALP decay assumption.

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