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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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DOE OSTI2022

SBN-BD: O(10 GeV) Proton Beam Dump at Fermilab’s PIP-II Linac

Proton beam dumps are prolific sources of mesons enabling a powerful technique to search for vector mediator coupling of dark matter to neutral pion and higher mass meson decays. By the end of the decade the PIP-II linac will be delivering up to 1 MW of proton power to the FNAL campus. This includes a significant increase of power to the Booster Neutrino Beamline (BNB) which delivers 8 GeV protons to the Short Baseline Neutrino (SBN) detectors. By building a new dedicated beam dump target station, and using the SBN detectors, a greater than an order of magnitude increase in search sensitivity for dark matter relative to the recent MiniBooNE beam dump search can be achieved. This modest cost upgrade to the BNB would begin testing models of the highly motivated relic density limit predictions and provide novel ways to test explanations of the anomalous excess of low energy events seen by MiniBooNE.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2022

SBN-BD: $\mathcal{O}$(10 GeV) Proton Beam Dump at Fermilab's PIP-II Linac

Proton beam dumps are prolific sources of mesons enabling a powerful technique to search for vector mediator coupling of dark matter to neutral pion and higher mass meson decays. By the end of the decade the PIP-II linac will be delivering up to 1 MW of proton power to the FNAL campus. This includes a significant increase of power to the Booster Neutrino Beamline (BNB) which delivers 8 GeV protons to the Short Baseline Neutrino (SBN) detectors. By building a new dedicated beam dump target station, and using the SBN detectors, a greater than an order of magnitude increase in search sensitivity for dark matter relative to the recent MiniBooNE beam dump search can be achieved. This modest cost upgrade to the BNB would begin testing models of the highly motivated relic density limit predictions and provide novel ways to test explanations of the anomalous excess of low energy events seen by MiniBooNE.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2025

Light and Strange Vector Resonances from Lattice QCD at Physical Quark Masses

We present the first ab initio calculation at physical quark masses of scattering amplitudes describing the lightest pseudoscalar mesons interacting via the strong force in the vector channel. Using lattice quantum chromodynamics, we postdict the defining parameters for two short-lived resonances, the ρ(770) and K*(892) which manifest as complex energy poles in ππ and Kπ scattering amplitudes, respectively. The calculation proceeds by first computing the finite-volume energy spectrum of the two-hadron systems and then determining the amplitudes from the energies using the Lüscher formalism. The error budget includes a data-driven systematic error, obtained by scanning possible fit ranges and fit models to extract the spectrum from Euclidean correlators, as well as the scattering amplitudes from the latter. The final results, obtained by analytically continuing multiple parametrizations into the complex energy plane, are M ρ = 796(5)(50)MeV, Γ ρ = 192(10)(31) MeV, M K* = 893(2)(54) MeV, and Γ K = 51(2)(11) MeV, where the subscript indicates the resonance and M and Γ stand for the mass and width, respectively, and where the first bracket indicates the statistical and the second bracket the systematic uncertainty.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2024

Hidden-flavor four-quark states in the charm and bottom region

We discuss the spectrum and the internal composition of ground and excited four-quark states in the charm and bottom energy region. To this end we extend previous calculations within the framework of the relativistic four-body Faddeev-Yakubovsky equation to include quantum numbers with J P C = 0 + + , 0 − + , 1 − − , 1 + − and 1 + + and study their internal composition in terms of heavy-light meson pairs, hadroquarkonia and diquark-antidiquark clusters. We observe similar patterns in the charm and bottom energy region with different compositions of the four-quark states depending on J P C quantum numbers. Most notably, we find that all states with C · P = + 1 are dominated by heavy-light meson contributions, whereas for axial-vector states with J P C = 1 + − including the Z c ( 3900 ) we find a much more complicated picture depending on the flavor content. We systematically compare our results for the spectrum with existing experimental results and provide predictions for future analyses. Published by the American Physical Society 2024

Astronomy & Astrophysics↗
DOE OSTI2026

Exploring Resonance Structures in the Partial-Wave Analysis of ¿p0 Photoproduction at GlueX

This thesis studies what happens when a photon (¿) collides with a proton (p) and produces a neutral omega (¿) and pion (p0) pair, with a recoiling proton (p'), expressed as ¿p ¿ ¿p0p'. We study this and other reactions to better understand the strong nuclear force; one of the four fundamental forces that govern all the physics of the universe. This force is specifically responsible for the binding and decay of subatomic particles, such as the ones here. While we understand the ¿ and p0, what we are actually interested in is a short-lived unknown particle X that decays via X ¿ ¿p0. There are a multitude of possible particles X can be, and so our focus in this work is to find out what X is by determining its properties from the particles we measure. We do this via an intricate analysis procedure known as “partial-wave analysis”. By analogy, one can think of our particle detector as a buoy, and the particles we want to analyze (X) as pebbles hitting a pond. The waves created by the pebble will move our buoy, giving us information about the pebble that produced the wave. However, when multiple pebbles hit our pond, the waves overlap and interfere with each other. Our buoy only can measure the complicated interfering result of all the waves. To disentangle this, our partial-wave analysis works by modeling this interference pattern so that we may infer the properties of the pebbles (particles) we produced. In this thesis, we review the relevant experimental history in photoproduction and related production mechanisms, as well as the theoretical foundations that motivate our measurement. We describe the methods used to collect our data at the GlueX experiment stationed at the Jefferson Lab accelerator facility in Newport News, Virginia. We then detail the selections we apply to ensure our events are almost exclusively ¿p ¿ ¿p0p'. We cover the intensity model, how we verify its capabilities, and finally present our results together with systematic studies. Our primary result is the detection of a b1(1235) meson interfering with a wide JPC = 1-- vector state, measured via a mass-independent partial-wave analysis. It provides precise experimental results that can be used as input for theoretical models of the reaction, yielding conclusions about the procedures responsible for how our universe behaves at its most basic level.

Scheuer, Kevin [College of William and Mary, Willi↗
DOE OSTI2024

Measurement of the Photoproduction Cross-Section of f1(1285) in the Exclusive Reactions p¿ p'K±KSp± AT 7.5 < E¿ < 11.5 GeV with GlueX at Jefferson Lab

The f1(1285) meson is commonly understood to belong to the axial-vector nonet as the low-mass isoscalar partner to the f1(1420) but has been suggested as a candidate for a KK?+c.c molecule. A nearly mass-degenerate 0?+ state has been observed in ? p scattering that calls into question the established branching ratios of the f1(1285) decays. Recently, the differential cross-section for the photoproduction of f1(1285) was measured by the CLAS experiment and the results disagreed with theoretical predictions. Additionally, the CLAS experiment did not observe a mass-degenerate 0?+ state. We present the results of the first photoproduction cross-section measurement d?/dt of f1(1285) at 7.5 < E? < 11.5 GeV from the GlueX experiment at Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in the reactions ? p ? p?K?Ks?+ and ? p ? p?K+Ks??. We find that the production mechanism of f1(1285) is consistent with t-channel exchange. We also observe a difference in the differential cross-section of f1(1285) as a function of ?t as measured in the charge conjugated K?Ks?± decay modes that we hypothesize to be due to baryonic N? interference. The observed distributions of M(KK) and M(K?) are consistent with both a q ¯ q state and predictions for a KK?+c.c molecular state. Additionally, we find that the cross-section at low M(KK?) is dominated by the 1++ state.

Viducic, Tyler↗
DOE OSTI2025

Amplitude Analysis of ωπ0 Photoproduction at GlueX

spectrum of light mesons produced from a linearly polarized photon beam. The production and decays of a light meson resonance X such as γp → Xp′ →ωπ0p′ can be modeled with polarized vector-pseudoscalar ampli- tudes, which can describe the contribution of individual amplitudes to the total measured intensity. The status of mass-independent fits to the ωπ0 mass spectrum over a wide range of mass and momentum transfer−twill be presented, with an emphasis on interactions with the b1(1235) meson. We will also present in parallel an analysis of moments of the angular dis- tributions for the same process, as a means of verifying the stability of the amplitude-based results. These results will help to improve the broader knowledge of light meson states and how they are produced.

Scheuer, Kevin [College of William and Mary, Willi↗
DOE OSTI2026

SEARCHING FOR MESONIC DARK MATTER WITH THE HEAVY PHOTON SEARCH EXPERIMENT

Several highly-sensitive astrophysical experiments over the past couple of decades have demonstrated that the current abundance of visible Standard Model matter cannot explain galactic rotation curves, the expansion history of the Universe, or the apparent warping of light in empty space. Instead, one finds strong agreement with this body of experimental results upon positing the existence of an invisible particulate field, dark matter. Namely, a cold, weakly interacting dark matter component can explain all these phenomena. A number of accelerator-based experiments have been developed to search for the weak couplings/interactions of these particles, many of them concentrating on particle models with masses of tens to thousands of GeV. A relatively new, well-motivated model is a dark sector coupled to the Standard Model via a dark photon. The current abundance of dark matter can be obtained if one assumes that dark matter is coupled to light by a MeV to GeV particle with a U(1) symmetry. The parameter space of these models remains largely unexplored because they are difficult to probe experimentally. In this thesis, I analyze data from the Heavy Photon Search (HPS) detector, whose two detector halves closely surround the electron beam, providing acceptance to far-forward boosted interactions. This forward acceptance to highly boosted particles yields unprecedented sensitivity to MeV-scale invariant masses. I exhaustively optimize the offline reconstruction of the HPS detector. Each reconstruction object, from Silicon Vertex Tracker hits to tracks, is studied to maximize acceptance of dark matter events. I then use the 2021 run data to search for one model of dark-photon-mediated matter, the Strongly Interacting Massive Particle (SIMP). SIMP models provide self-interacting dark matter candidates that can form bound states resembling dark mesons. HPS can detect SIMPs through the decay of a dark vector boson (either a dark ¿ or ¿) into e+e- pairs. I obtain exclusion contours for SIMPs using both an optimized cuts-based selection and a machine-learning-based selection, advancing our knowledge of the nature of dark matter.

O'Dwyer, Rory [Stanford Univ., CA (United States).↗
DOE OSTI2023

Production of $Υ(nS)$ mesons in Pb + Pb and $pp$ collisions at 5.02 TeV

A measurement of the production of vector bottomonium states, $Υ$(1S), $Υ$(2S), and $Υ$(3S), in Pb + Pb and $pp$ collisions at a center-of-mass energy per nucleon pair of 5.02 TeV is presented. The data correspond to integrated luminosities of 1.38 nb –1 of Pb + Pb data collected in 2018, 0.44 nb –1 of Pb + Pb data collected in 2015, and 0.26 fb –1 of $pp$ data collected in 2017 by the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider. The measurements are performed in the dimuon decay channel for transverse momentum ${p}_{T}^{μμ}$ < 30 GeV, absolute rapidity |$y^{μμ}$| < 1.5, and Pb + Pb event centrality 0–80%. The production rates of the three bottomonium states in Pb + Pb collisions are compared with those in $pp$ collisions to extract the nuclear modification factors as functions of event centrality, ${p}_{T}^{μμ}$, and $|y^{μμ}|$. In addition, the suppression of the excited states relative to the ground state is studied. The results are compared with theoretical model calculations.

73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2024

Timelike meson form factors beyond the elastic region from lattice QCD

We present a calculation of the vector-isovector timelike form factors of the pion and the kaon using lattice quantum chromodynamics. We calculate two-point correlation functions with m π ∼ 280 MeV , extracting both the finite-volume spectrum and matrix elements for these states created from the vacuum by a vector current. After determining the coupled-channel π π , K K ¯ scattering amplitudes, we perform the necessary correction for the significant finite-volume effects present in the current matrix elements, leading to the timelike form factors. We find these to be dominated by the presence of the ρ resonance, and we extract its decay constant by an analytic continuation of the amplitudes to the resonance pole. In addition, the spacelike pion form factor is determined on the same lattice configurations, and a dispersive parametrization is used to simultaneously describe the spacelike and elastic timelike regions. Published by the American Physical Society 2024

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2023

Recent progress in low energy neutrino scattering physics and its implications for the standard and beyond the standard model physics

Neutrinos continue to provide a testing ground for the structure of the standard model of particle physics as well as hints towards the physics beyond the standard model. Neutrinos of energies spanning over several orders of magnitude, originating in many terrestrial and astrophysical processes, have been detected via various decay and interaction mechanisms. At MeV scales, there has been one elusive process, until a few years ago, known as coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering (CEvNS) that was theoretically predicted over five decades ago but was never observed experimentally. The recent experimental observation of the CEvNS process by the COHERENT collaboration at a stopped pion neutrino source has inspired physicists across many subfields. This has vital implications for nuclear physics, high-energy physics, astrophysics, and beyond. CEvNS, being a low-energy process, provides a natural window to study light, weakly-coupled, new physics in the neutrino sector. In this review, we intend to provide the current status of low energy neutrino scattering physics and its implications for the standard and beyond the standard model physics. We discuss the general formalism of calculating the tree-level CEvNS cross section and present estimated theoretical uncertainties on the CEvNS cross section stemming from different sources. We also discuss the inelastic scattering of tens of MeV neutrinos that have implications for supernova detection in future neutrino experiments. We discuss how the CEvNS experiments can be used as a testing ground for the Standard Model (SM) weak physics as well as in searching for the Beyond the Standard Model (BSM) physics signals. Any deviation from the SM predicted event rate either with a change in the total event rate or with a change in the shape of the recoil spectrum, could indicate new contributions to the interaction cross-section. The SM implications include the study of weak nuclear form factor and weak mixing angle. The BSM studies include non-standard interactions, neutrino electromagnetic properties, and sterile neutrino searches. In conclusion, stopped pion facilities are also a copious source of neutral and changed mesons that allow study of several dark sector physics scenarios such as vector portal models, leptophobic dark matter as well as axion-like particle searches.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2023

$B$-meson semileptonic decays with highly improved staggered quarks

We present an update of the Fermilab Lattice and MILC Collaborations project to compute the form factors for semileptonic $B_{(s)}$-meson decays. Our calculation uses the highly improved staggered quark (HISQ) action for sea and valence quarks, and ensembles with up, down, strange, and charm quarks in the sea. Using a highly improved action with the MILC Collaboration's gauge ensembles with lattice spacings down to $a\approx0.03$ fm, allows the heavy valence quarks to be treated with the same discretization as the light and strange quarks. This unified treatment of the valence quarks allows for absolutely normalized vector currents, bypassing the need for perturbative matching, which has been a source of uncertainty in previous calculations of $B$-meson decay form factors by our collaboration. All preliminary form-factor results are blinded.

Lytle, Andrew↗
DOE OSTI2020

Dark matter through the quark vector current portal

We consider models of light dark matter coupled to quarks through a vector current interaction. For low energies, these models must be treated through the effective couplings to mesons, which are implemented here through the chiral Lagrangian. We find the rates of dark matter annihilation and decay to the light mesons, and find the expected photon spectrum from the decay of the hadrons. We compare to current and future observations, and show that there is a significant discovery reach for these models.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2020

Asymptotic behavior of meson transition form factors

One of the open issues in evaluations of the contribution from hadronic light-by-light scattering to the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon (g - 2)µ concerns the role of heavier scalar, axial-vector, and tensormeson intermediate states. The coupling of axial vectors to virtual photons is suppressed for small virtualities by the Landau–Yang theorem, but otherwise there are few rigorous constraints on the corresponding form factors. In this paper, we first derive the Lorentz decomposition of the two-photon matrix elements into scalar functions following the general recipe by Bardeen, Tung, and Tarrach. Based on this decomposition, we then calculate the asymptotic behavior of the meson transition form factors from a light-cone expansion in analogy to the asymptotic limits for the pseudoscalar transition form factor derived by Brodsky and Lepage. Finally, we compare our results to existing data as well as previous models employed in the literature.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗
DOE OSTI2024

Constituent model of light hybrid meson decays

A model of light hybrid mesons and their strong decays is developed. The model employs a gluonic quasiparticle to describe low energy gluodynamics and uses the QCD Hamiltonian in Coulomb gauge to guide the construction of states and decay amplitudes. We compute the partial widths of the twelve low lying isovector and vector hybrids. Implications of these results on hybrid searches are also made, with the chief conclusions being that direct observation of the vector states will be difficult, that a hybrid π ( 1800 ) has distinctive decay characteristics, a narrow η ( 1900 ) hybrid should exist, an η 1 ( 1750 ) should be sought, and that the exotic nature of J P C = 2 − + hybrid mesons should be discernible with sufficient data. We argue that the isovector π 2 hybrid has been discovered, giving a total of four possible hybrid mesons, π 1 ( 1600 ) , η 1 ( 1855 ) , π ( 1800 ) , and π 2 ( 2360 ) , which appear to be filling out the low lying hybrid supermultiplet in the expected fashion. Published by the American Physical Society 2024

Astronomy & Astrophysics↗
DOE OSTI2025

New physics particles mixing with mesons: Production in the fragmentation chain

A class of extensions to the Standard Model adds hypothetical long-lived particles (LLPs) that have mass- or kinetic-mixing with neutral mesons, such as pions or rho mesons. The mixing can contribute significantly to the production of LLPs at proton accelerator experiments, and no consistent description of these production modes exists in the literature. In this paper, we develop a framework for studying different LLPs—dark photons, vector mediators coupled to the baryon current, and axionlike particles with different coupling patterns. In particular, we implement the production mechanisms in PYTHIA 8, study how the overall flux and kinematic distributions depend on the LLP’s mass, and compare various subprocesses where the mixing contributes—proton bremsstrahlung, meson decay, and production in the fragmentation chain. We find that our new description of LLP production predicts an integrated flux that differs from current approaches by one to two orders of magnitude, and highlight the unavoidable theoretical uncertainties coming from poor knowledge of the properties of heavy mesons.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2024

Limits on W R from Meson Decays

In this Letter we show that pseudoscalar meson leptonic decay data can be used to set stringent limits on the mass $m$ W$_{R}$ of a right-handed vector boson, such as the one that appears in left-right symmetric models. We have shown that for a heavy neutrino with a mass $m_N$ in the range 50 < $m_N$/MeV < 1900 one can constraint $m$ W$_{R}$ ≳ (4–19) TeV at 90% CL. This provides the most stringent experimental limits on the $W_R$ mass to date for this heavy neutrino mass range.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗