Searching for long-lived dark photons with the Heavy Photon Search Experiment

by Sarah Christina Gaiser (Stanford University)

Thursday 4 Dec 2025, 10:00 → 12:00 Europe/Berlin

Käthe-Kümmel-Str. 1/U1.059 (ROT) - Conference Room (ROT)

Abstract: 

A popular model for light (sub-GeV) Dark Matter is that its constituents belong to a Hidden Sector, uncharged under the Standard Model (SM) forces, and coupled to the SM through a new force carrier. A theoretically well-motivated minimal extension to the SM introduces a light U(1) gauge boson, referred to as the dark photon A’ that kinetically mixes with the SM photon. This opens a production channel for dark photons analogous to bremsstrahlung in which an electron radiates off an A’.

The Heavy Photon Search (HPS) at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility has been primarily designed to search for electro-produced dark photons decaying into electron-positron pairs. In particular, HPS is sensitive to an experimental signature where long-lived dark photons decay displaced from the target. In this talk, I will describe the design and performance of the HPS detector before illustrating the procedure of the displaced vertex analysis.

 

 

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