Probing Cosmic Ray Composition and Muon-philic Dark Matter via a Table top Muon Tomography System

7 Oct 2026, 09:50
20m
503/1-001 - Council Chamber (CERN)

503/1-001 - Council Chamber

CERN

162
Show room on map

Speaker

Mr Leyun Gao (Peking University (CN))

Description

This work presents a novel cosmic-ray scattering experiment employing a Resistive Plate Chambers (RPC) muon tomography system. By introducing the scattering angle between incident and outgoing cosmic-ray tracks as a key observable, this approach enables simultaneous studies of secondary cosmic-ray composition and searching for new physics. During a 63-day campaign, 1.18 million cosmic ray scattering events were recorded and analyzed. By performing combined template fits to the observed angular distribution, particle abundances are measured, for example, resolving the electron component at ∼2% precision. Furthermore, constraints are established on elastic muon-dark matter (DM) scattering cross-sections for muon-philic dark matter. At the 95% confidence level, the limit reaches 1.62 ×10−17cm2 for 1 GeV slow DM, demonstrating sensitivity limit to light muon-coupled slow DM. Refs: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.23458 and https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.22956

Authors

Mr Leyun Gao (Peking University (CN)) Qiang Li (Peking University (CN))

Presentation materials

There are no materials yet.