- Jan. 21, 2022, 4:00 pm US/Central
- Pawel Guzowski, University of Manchester
The MicroBooNE liquid argon time projection chamber (LArTPC) has collected a record number of neutrino interactions from two high-intensity neutrino beamlines (BNB and NuMI) at Fermilab. The experiment has demonstrated that liquid-argon technology enables a far-reaching physics program, and has recently released its first results investigating the nature of the MiniBooNE anomalous excess of low-energy electromagnetic events, performed the first high-statistics neutrino cross section measurements on argon, and has conducted extensive research and development on a large, long-running LArTPC. A broad suite of Beyond-the-Standard-Model searches can also be conducted, and in this talk, I will focus on searches for new physics in the multiple high intensity proton-on-fixed-target beamlines, which could be mediating rare decays of pions, kaons, and other light mesons. I will present two recently published analyses, the first of which is a search for heavy neutral leptons produced in the BNB, the first such search in a LArTPC. The second analysis is a search for light, 100-MeV scale Higgs-portal scalars produced in the beam dump of the NuMI beam, which set the world’s best limit for a range of scalar masses difficult to probe in complementary experiments at CERN. I will also present prospects for future searches for exotica that the experiment will be undertaking, including scattering of dark matter produced in the beams, and searches for evidence of other long-lived particle models.