Searching for long-lived light neutralinos and axionlike particles at the SHiNESS experiment

Abstract

Recently Soleti et al. [JHEP03(2024)148] proposed a new experiment called SHiNESS at the upcoming European Spallation Source (ESS) facility, making use of the 2-GeV proton beam there impinging on a fixed target, in order to search for hidden sterile neutrinos that could lie in different mass ranges and arise with distinct signatures. Such signatures include excesses in electron-positron pairs that may originate from displaced decays of long-lived particles (LLPs). At the ESS, the dominant sources of such LLPs are decays at rest of $\pi^+$ mesons and $\mu^+$ leptons. We choose to investigate theoretical scenarios of long-lived light neutralinos in the R-parity-violating supersymmetry and long-lived weak-violating electrophilic axionlike particles, as these LLPs can be produced from decays of $\pi^+$ and $\mu^+$. Since the $\pi^+$'s and $\mu^+$'s decay at rest at the ESS, we compute the spectra of the therefrom produced LLPs, and thus estimate the expected sensitivity reach of SHiNESS to the LLPs in these two scenarios. Our calculation shows that in multiple relevant benchmark scenarios, SHiNESS can probe large parameter regions of these models beyond the existing bounds, in just a couple of years of data-collection time.