Dipole portal and neutrinophilic scalars at DUNE revisited: The importance of the high-energy neutrino tail

We estimate the sensitivity of the DUNE experiment to new physics particles interacting with neutrinos, considering the dipole portal to heavy neutral leptons and a neutrinophilic scalar with lepton-number 2 as examples. We demonstrate that neutrinos from the high-energy tail of the DUNE flux, with energies $E_ν≳5–10  GeV$, may significantly improve the sensitivity to these models, allowing to search for particles as heavy as $≃10  GeV$. We also study the impact of the so-called tau-optimized neutrino beam configuration, which slightly improves sensitivity to the new physics models considered here. For both models, we consider new production channels (such as deep-inelastic scattering) and provide a detailed comparison of different signatures in the detector.