MiniBooNE hints at a textured Dark Sector

The Boo! stands for "Booster", as in the Mini Booster Neutrino Experiment (MiniBooNE). MiniBooNE is a Fermilab experiment that repurposed an old Los Alamos experimental detector (LSND) to look for electron neutrini induced from a beam of muon neutrinos. The neutrino - Italian for little, neutral one - is a troublesome, "ghostly" particle that seems to unnecessarily complicate an already complicated Standard Model of Particle Physics.

MiniBooNE - like its predecessor LSND - has been detecting an anomalously large number of electron neutrinos. This inspired a lot of bluster around so-called sterile neutrinos, although those ideas have since been retired by other experiments. Without going into the details: the neutrino physics in confusing, conflicted and complicated.

Thomas Lewton has an overly dramatic retelling of modern neutrino physics over a Quanta Magazine, but the facts are right, so it's a reasonable survey of results. As Lewton points out, properly modeling the conflicting results in neutrino experiments makes a complicated "hidden" or "dark matter" sector rather attractive possibility. In short, simple models have a lot of trouble modeling what experiments are seeing.

Bhaskar Dutta et. al. at Texas A&M University have recently drilled this point home, showing how novel pion and kaon decays to as yet unknown "dark matter" particles can explain much of the MiniBooNE data.