Detecting light leptophilic gauge boson at BESIII detector

Abstract

The $ O(GeV)$ extra $ U(1)$ gauge boson named U-boson, has been proposed to mediate the interaction among leptons and dark matter (DM), in order to account for the observations by PAMELA and ATIC. In such kind of models, the extra U(1) gauge group can be chosen as $U(1)_{L_i-L_j}$ with $L_i$ the $i-$th generation lepton number. This anomaly-free model provides appropriate dark matter relic density and boost factor required by experiments. In this work the observability of such kind of U-boson at BESIII detector is investigated through the processes $ e^ + e^ - \to Uγ$, followed by $U\to e^+e^-$, $U\to μ^+μ^-$ and $U\to ν\overlineν$. In the invisible channel where U-boson decays into neutrinos, BESIII can measure the coupling of the extra $ U(1)$ down to $ O(10^{- 4}) \sim O(10^{- 5})$ because of the low Standard Model backgrounds. In the visible channel where U-boson decays into charged lepton pair, BESIII can only measure the coupling down to $ O(10^{- 3}) \sim O(10^{- 4})$ due to the large irreducible QED backgrounds.