Dark Neutrino Portal to Explain MiniBooNE Excess

Abstract

We present a novel framework that provides an explanation to the long-standing excess of electronlike events in the MiniBooNE experiment at Fermilab. We suggest a new dark sector containing a dark neutrino and a dark gauge boson, both with masses between a few tens and a few hundreds of MeV. Dark neutrinos are produced via neutrino-nucleus scattering, followed by their decay to the dark gauge boson, which in turn gives rise to electronlike events. This mechanism provides an excellent fit to MiniBooNE energy spectra and angular distributions.