Bulletin of the American Physical Society
86th Annual Meeting of the APS Southeastern Section
Volume 64, Number 19
Thursday–Saturday, November 7–9, 2019; Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina
Session A04: Accelerator-based Dark Sector Production |
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Chair: Alexander Somov, Jefferson Laboratory Room: Holiday Inn Resort Oceanwatch |
Thursday, November 7, 2019 8:30AM - 9:00AM |
A04.00001: Status of the JLab Eta Factory (JEF) experiment Invited Speaker: Simon Taylor The JLab Eta Factory (JEF) experiment is an approved experiment in Hall D at Jefferson Lab that focuses on decays of $\eta$ mesons produced in the reaction $\gamma p \to p \eta$ with emphasis on the rare $\eta\to\pi^0\gamma\gamma$ channel. In addition to providing a rare window into higher-order chiral perturbation theory, this channel can be used to search for evidence of dark matter. A potential extension to the Standard Model posits a dark gauge boson $B$ that couples predominately with quarks and can be observed in the $\eta\to\gamma B$, $B\to\pi^0\gamma$ channel\footnote{S.~Tulin, Phys.\ Rev.\ D {\bf 89}, no. 11, 114008 (2014).}. The same set of final state particles can also be used to look for a scalar dark matter mediator $S$ in the $\eta\to\pi^0S$, $S\to\gamma\gamma$ channel\footnote{B.~Batell, A.~Freitas, A.~Ismail and D.~McKeen, arXiv:1812.05103 [hep-ph].}. In order to achieve the requisite resolution to clearly identify these rare channels, this experiment calls for an upgrade to the existing GlueX equipment, which is a fixed target apparatus based on a 2-Tesla solenoid magnet (which enables reconstruction of the momentum of the recoil proton). Neutral particles emerging after the interaction of the photon beam with a liquid hydrogen target are detected in the forward direction in the Forward Calorimeter (FCAL), an array of lead glass blocks. We plan to replace the $\sim$80$\times$80 cm$^2$ region of the FCAL closest to the beam line with an array of 2$\times$2$\times$20 cm$^3$ lead tungstate crystals. The current status of the JEF project will be presented. [Preview Abstract] |
Thursday, November 7, 2019 9:00AM - 9:30AM |
A04.00002: Search for sub-GeV Dark Matter with MiniBooNE Invited Speaker: Remington Thornton Cosmological observations indicate that our universe contains dark matter, yet we have no measurements of its microscopic properties. Direct detection experiments search for a nuclear recoil interaction and have a low-mass sensitivity edge of order 1 GeV. A path to detect dark matter with mass below 1 GeV is to search for boosted dark matter being produced at accelerators. Neutrino detectors are already sensitive to dark matter interactions because of the similarity of the dark matter and neutrino signatures in the detector. The MiniBooNE experiment, located at Fermilab on the Booster Neutrino Beamline, has searched for dark matter produced from protons interacting in the beam-dump using various interaction channels. This talk will go over the analysis and results of this search. [Preview Abstract] |
Thursday, November 7, 2019 9:30AM - 10:00AM |
A04.00003: Casting light on the Dark Sector with BDX at Jefferson Lab Invited Speaker: Marzio De Napoli The Beam Dump eXperiment (BDX) is an electron-beam thick-target experiment aimed to investigate the existence of Light Dark Matter (LDM) particles in the MeV-GeV mass range at Jefferson Lab. The experiment has been approved by JLab PAC46 and is expected to run in a dedicated underground facility located about 20 m downstream of the Hall A beam-dump. It will make use of a 10.6 GeV e- beam collecting up to $10^{22}$ electrons on target. The detector consists of two main components: a CsI(Tl) electromagnetic calorimeter (Ecal) and a veto system used to reject the background. The expected signature of the DM interaction in the Ecal is a $\sim$GeV electromagnetic shower paired with a null activity in the surrounding active veto counters. In addition to the veto system, a specific shielding configuration installed between the dump and the detector will be used to suppress the high-energy component of the beam-related background. A proof of concept measurement has recently started at JLAB in the present unshielded configuration. It is using a 2.2 GeV e- beam and is expected to run parasitically for 1 year. The compact detector used, called BDX-MINI, is made by a PbWO4 electromagnetic calorimeter, surrounded by a layer of tungsten shielding and two hermetic plastic scintillator veto systems. It was lowered in a well, dug downstream HALL A at the location of the proposed BDX facility, and positioned 8 m underground at the beam height. This talk will present an overview of the BDX experiment and a focus on the description of the current measurement and its preliminary results. This early stage experiment represents the first dedicated new-generation beam-dump experiment whose physics reach should almost cover a parameter region measured by summing up old not-optimized experiments. [Preview Abstract] |
Thursday, November 7, 2019 10:00AM - 10:30AM |
A04.00004: The Heavy Photon Search experiment at Jefferson Lab Invited Speaker: Rafayel Paremuzyan The Heavy Photon Search (HPS) experiment in Hall-B of Jefferson Lab is searching for a new heavy vector boson that is a well motivated and viable force particle, which could mediate interactions with hidden-sector dark matter. It is designed to search for heavy photons in the mass range between $\mathrm{ 15\; MeV}$ and $\mathrm{ 500\; MeV}$ and the coupling to electrons that is $\epsilon e > 10^{-10}e$, through their decay to $e^{-}e^{+}$ pairs. A precision tracking/vertexing detector allows searching for heavy photons using both resonance-search and secondary vertex strategies. In 2015 and 2016, HPS collected its first engineering data with 1.05 and 2.3 GeV beam energies respectively, which allowed us to understand and characterize the detector performance and to develop analysis techniques for both resonance-search and vertex searches. These analyses led to detector upgrades, which have improved HPS's physics reach by adding an additional layer to the tracking detector and adding a scintillation hodoscope to the trigger. The first physics run of HPS, which incorporates these two upgrades, started in June of 2019, and finished early in September of 2019. In this talk, the upgraded detector and its expected reach will be discussed together with published and preliminary results from the engineering runs. [Preview Abstract] |
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