Title: New physics in charged meson decays and its application to the MiniBooNE excess
Speaker: Doojin Kim (Texas A&M)
Abstract: We point out that production of new bosons by charged meson decays can significantly enhance the sensitivity of beam-focused accelerator-based experiments to new physics signals. This enhancement arises since the charged mesons are focused and their three-body decays do not suffer from helicity suppression in the same way as their usual two-body decays. As a realistic application, we discuss the MiniBooNE low energy excess with this mechanism, demonstrating that dark-sector interpretations can be plausible solutions to the excess. We consider two well-motivated classes of dark-sector models, models of vector-portal dark matter and models of long-lived (pseudo)scalar, arguing that the model parameter values to explain the excess satisfy existing constraints and that they can be tested at current/future neutrino experiments.