Terrestrial and Solar Limits on Long-Lived Particles in a Dark Sector

Abstract

Dark matter charged under a new gauge sector, as motivated by recent data, suggests a rich GeV-scale "dark sector" weakly coupled to the Standard Model by gauge kinetic mixing. The new gauge bosons can decay to Standard Model leptons, but this mode is suppressed if decays into lighter dark sector particles are kinematically allowed. These particles in turn typically have macroscopic decay lifetimes that are constrained by two classes of experiments, which we discuss. Lifetimes of 10 cm < c tau < 10^8 cm are constrained by existing terrestrial beam-dump experiments. If, in addition, dark matter captured in the Sun (or Earth) annihilates into these particles, lifetimes up to 10^15 cm are constrained by solar observations. These bounds span fourteen orders of magnitude in lifetime, but they are not exhaustive. Accordingly, we identify promising new directions for experiments including searches for displaced di-muons in B-factories, studies at high-energy and -intensity proton beam dumps, precision gamma-ray and electronic measurements of the Sun, and milli-charge searches re-analyzed in this new context.