Toward a heavy axion selection in MicroBooNE using the NuMI beam

MicroBooNE was a Liquid Argon Time Projection Chamber (LArTPC) detector with an 85 tonnes fiducial mass, located off-axis in the Neutrinos at the Main Injector (NuMI) beam at Fermilab. The goals of MicroBooNE includes searching for exotic particles such as axions. Axions are hypothetical pseudo scalar bosons, originally introduced to solve the strong CP problem in QCD. They are assumed to have a mass below the eV scale; however, by introducing a new strongly-coupled mirror SU(3) sector, heavy axions can be obtained with masses from 20MeV to 2GeV. These axions, coming from the target of the NuMI beam via meson-mixing and gluon-gluon fusion, can decay into two visible photons that would be detectable with MicroBooNE. This talk will explore MicroBooNE’s sensitivity to heavy axions with this diphoton decay channel based on Monte Carlo simulations.