New production channels for light dark matter in hadronic showers

Understand

Hadronic showers transfer a relevant amount of their energy to electromagnetic subshowers.

• We show that the generation of "secondary" dark photons in these sub-showers is significant and typically dominates the production at low dark photon masses.
• The resulting dark photons are however substantially less energetic than the ones originating from mesons decay.
• We illustrate this point both semi-analytically and through Monte Carlo simulations.