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arXiv · 2512.10084

Potential for the discovery of the protophobic boson at the STCF

Althaf M.·Triparno Bandyopadhyay
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Abstract

We study the morphology of the main drift chamber (MDC) to be built around the collision point of the proposed Super tau-charm facility (STCF), to check its suitability for discovering the 17 MeV protophobic boson (X17 boson), hypothesised as a solution to the persistent ATOMKI nuclear-transition anomalies. Using the TrackEff framework, we perform detector-level simulations of the STCF MDC, and evaluate displaced-vertex sensitivities towards the protophobic boson, across the relevant mass-coupling parameter space. We study benchmark scenarios with visible and dark decay channels to perform likelihood-based significance estimates in order to determine the 5~$\sigma$ discovery reach for the protophobic boson. We find that STCF can potentially discover the protophobic boson while tolerating $\sim 10^4$ background events for specific regions of the parameter space. Our analysis establishes the first feasibility study of displaced light-boson searches at the STCF, motivating a full Geant-4 simulation.

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Althaf M., Triparno Bandyopadhyay. 2025-12-10. Potential for the discovery of the protophobic boson at the STCF. https://doi.org/10.1007/jhep05(2026)227

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