Léo Borrel | Searcharxiv

arXiv2025

LDMX -- The Light Dark Matter eXperiment

The Light Dark Matter eXperiment (LDMX) is an electron fixed-target experiment optimized to search for sub-GeV dark matter production through the missing momentum signature. LDMX is designed to operate in End Station A at SLAC, using an 8 GeV electron beam accelerated alongside the LCLS-II drive beam. The design of the apparatus is strongly motivated by the performance requirements of a high-rate missing momentum search and leverages detector technologies and designs from other experiments along with existing facilities at SLAC. LDMX will improve on previous results by up to three orders of magnitude, enabling broad sensitivity to dark sector scenarios including the dark matter interaction strengths motivated by freeze-out of MeV-GeV mass dark matter to the observed relic abundance. With hermetic forward coverage, LDMX also has sensitivity to visible signatures of dark sectors and provides a unique probe of electron-nuclear interactions important to interpreting data from accelerator-based neutrino experiments. This report encompasses the technical design of the LDMX Detector, its simulated performance, and the physics capabilities of the experiment.

hep-ex↗

arXiv2025

A New Determination of the (Z,A) Dependence of Coherent Muon-to-Electron Conversion

Should muon-to-electron conversion in the field of a nucleus be found in the current generation of experiments, the measurement of the atomic number dependence of the process will become an important experimental goal. We present a new treatment of the (Z,A) dependence of coherent muon-to-electron conversion in 236 isotopes. Our approach differs from previous treatments in several ways. Firstly, we include the effect of permanent quadrupole deformation on the charged lepton flavor violating matrix elements, using the method of Barrett moments. This method also enables the addition of muonic X-ray nuclear size and shape determinations of the charge distribution to the electron scattering results used previously. Secondly, we employ a Hartree-Bogoliubov model to calculate neutron-related matrix elements for even-even nuclei. This takes into account the quadrupole deformation of the neutron distributions and the fact that neutrons are, in general, in different shell model orbits than protons. The calculated conversion rates differ from previous calculations, particularly in the region of large permanent quadrupole deformation. Finally, we propose an alternative normalization of the muon-to-electron conversion rated, which related more closely to what a given experiment acturally measures, and better separate lepton physics from nuclear physics effects.

hep-ph↗