The Lohengrin experiment - searching for light dark matter at ELSA

by Matthias Hamer (uni-bonn)

Thursday 9 Nov 2023, 10:00 → 12:00 Europe/Berlin

Nußallee 12/1.049 (PI) - Conference Room II (PI)

The nature of dark matter remains an interesting question in high energy physics - while many extensions to the SM provide a possible explanation for dark matter, experiments searching for dark matter particles in many different ways have produced only negative or non-reproducible results so far. During the LHC era, the spotlight has been on searches for WIMPs, weakly interacting massive particles, at the TeV-scale. The Lee-Weinberg bound puts a lower limit at the order of a few GeV on the mass for the WIMP(s), assuming they make up all dark matter in our universe.
The introduction of a larger "dark sector" with a new interaction allows the hypothetical dark matter particle to be significantly lighter than this lower limit. This enables dark matter searches using particle beams with energies at the GeV-scale. For a particular family of dark sector models, dark matter could be produced through the emition of "dark photon bremsstrahlung" by hitting a sufficiently thick target with a ~GeV electron beam, as can be extracted from the ELSA accelerator in Bonn.
In my talk I will present a concept for a light dark matter search experiment at ELSA, the Lohengrin experiment. The layout of the experiment is based on an ultrathin, ultrafast silicon tracking detector, in combination with an AI engine based hardware track trigger and existing sampling detectors for electromagnetic and hadronic calorimetry. I will present the preparatory studies for and the evolution of the layout of Lohengrin, as well as a projection of the expected discovery reach of the experiment.

 

 

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Lohengrin_PPSBonn.pdf