Dark photons from charged pion bremsstrahlung at proton beam experiments

The production and subsequent rescattering of secondary pions produced in proton beam dumps provide additional opportunities for the production of light new particles such as dark photons. This new mechanism has been overlooked in the past but can extend the mass reach of the SpinQuest experiment and its proposed DarkQuest upgrade. We use chiral perturbation theory to calculate the production of kinetically mixed dark photons through bremsstrahlung off secondary charged pions. We find that the reach of SpinQuest/DarkQuest can be pushed further into the multi-GeV mass range compared to estimates based only on primary dark photon production through meson decay or proton bremsstrahlung. Our analysis can be regarded as the first of several steps to include secondary pion contributions. In an upcoming analysis we will extend our calculation into the high-momentum-transfer regime through the use of pion parton distribution functions and including hadronic resonances, which will further increase the estimated mass reach.