Projected Sensitivity to Slow Muonphilic Dark Matter with Accelerator Muon Beams

@misc{zhang2026projected,
  title = {{Projected Sensitivity to Slow Muonphilic Dark Matter with Accelerator Muon Beams}},
  author = {Rongfeng Zhang and Cheng-en Liu and Ruihu Zhu and Yu Xu and Zijian Wang and Leyun Gao and Xueheng Zhang and Qite Li and Liangwen Chen and Chen Zhou and Qiang Li and Zhiyu Sun},
  howpublished = {arXiv},
  year = {2026},
  month = sep,
  doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.11617},
  eprint = {2609.11617},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11617},
}

TY  - UNPB
TI  - Projected Sensitivity to Slow Muonphilic Dark Matter with Accelerator Muon Beams
AU  - Rongfeng Zhang
AU  - Cheng-en Liu
AU  - Ruihu Zhu
AU  - Yu Xu
AU  - Zijian Wang
AU  - Leyun Gao
AU  - Xueheng Zhang
AU  - Qite Li
AU  - Liangwen Chen
AU  - Chen Zhou
AU  - Qiang Li
AU  - Zhiyu Sun
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/09/10
PB  - arXiv
DO  - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.11617
UR  - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11617
AB  - The nature of dark matter (DM) remains one of the most enduring open questions in modern physics, and muonphilic DM has emerged as a promising scenario that complements traditional DM candidates. Following the recently established cosmic-ray muon scattering approach, we investigate the sensitivity for probing slow muonphilic DM with accelerator muon beams. A Geant4-based simulation framework is developed, incorporating the detector geometry from the PKMu muon tomography system and a dedicated elastic μ-DM scattering process. The projected sensitivity is found to be largely insensitive to both the beam energy and the transverse beam size when the beam is fully contained within the detector acceptance. For a benchmark beam intensity of 10^5/s, the simulated pure-muon beam surpasses the existing cosmic-ray limit of 1.61×10^−17 cm^2 at m_DM=1 GeV within approximately 11 seconds. A realistic muon beam phase-space distribution based on simulations for the High Intensity heavy-ion Accelerator Facility (HIAF) is also implemented, yielding projected limits that improve upon the cosmic-ray results by nearly two orders of magnitude in a one-day exposure. These results demonstrate that a beam-muon scattering experiment offers a robust and promising route toward significantly improved sensitivity to slow muonphilic DM.
ER  -