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 $E_{\nu }\gtrsim 5-10\text{ GeV}$, may significantly improve the sensitivity to these models, allowing to search for particles as heavy as $\simeq 10\text{ GeV}$. 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.