Study of the discovery potential for hidden photon emission at future electron scattering fixed target experiments

Abstract

Electron scattering fixed target experiments are a versatile tool to explore various physics phenomena. Recently these experiments came into focus to search for $U(1)$ extensions of the Standard Model of particle physics at low energies. These extensions are motivated from anomalies in astrophysical observations as well as from deviations from Standard Model predictions, such as the discrepancy between the experimental and theoretical determination of the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon. They also arise naturally when the Standard Model is embedded into a more general theory. In the considered $U(1)$ extensions a new, light messenger particle ${\gamma }^{\prime }$, the hidden photon, couples to the hidden sector as well as to the electromagnetic current of the Standard Model by kinetic mixing, which allows for a search for this particle e.g. in the invariant mass distribution of the process $e(A,Z)\to e(A,Z)l^{+}{l}^{-}$. In this process the hidden photon is emitted by bremsstrahlung and decays into a pair of Standard Model leptons. In this work we study the applicability of the Weizsäcker-Williams approximation to calculate the signal cross section of the process, which is widely used to design such experimental setups. Furthermore, based on a previous work, we investigate the discovery potential of future experimental setups at the Jefferson Lab. For that purpose we simulate the relevant cross sections for the signal and the QED background in the actual kinematical setups and obtain projected exclusion limits.

16 pages, 12 figures

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• Secluded U(1) below the weak scale
• New Fixed-Target Experiments to Search for Dark Gauge Forces
• U-boson production in e+e- annihilations, psi and Upsilon decays, and Light Dark Matter
• New Limits on Hidden Photons from Past Electron Beam Dumps
• Probing a Secluded U(1) at B-factories
• Probing Dark Forces and Light Hidden Sectors at Low-Energy e+e- Colliders
• Kinetic Mixing as the Origin of Light Dark Scales
• Constraints on sub-GeV hidden sector gauge bosons from a search for heavy neutrino decays
• Gamma-ray continuum emission from the inner Galactic region as observed with INTEGRAL/SPI
• Constraints on Hidden Photon Models from Electron g-2 and Hydrogen Spectroscopy
• Monte Carlo integration on GPU
• Search for Low-Mass Dark Matter at BABAR

Cited by in corpus (10)

• Search for light massive gauge bosons as an explanation of the $(g-2{)}_{\mu }$ anomaly at MAMI
• Muon g-2, Rare Kaon Decays, and Parity Violation from Dark Bosons
• The exact tree-level calculation of the dark photon production in high-energy electron scattering at the CERN SPS
• Photoproduction of axion-like particles in the NA64 experiment
• New Limits on Light Hidden Sectors from Fixed-Target Experiments
• Decaying light particles in the SHiP experiment: Signal rate estimates for hidden photons
• Proposal for an Experiment to Search for Light Dark Matter at the SPS
• Muon Beam Dump Experiments probe five-dimensional nature of $U(1{)}_{L_{\mu }-L_{\tau }}$
• Probing Hidden Sectors with a muon beam: Total and differential cross-sections for vector boson production in muon bremsstrahlung
• Dark photon manifestation in the triplet-like QED processes $\gamma +{\ell }_i\to {\ell }_j^{+}{\ell }_j^{-}+{\ell }_i$, $i\ne j,$ $i=e,\mu ,$ $j=e,\mu ,\tau$