Detecting Dark Photon with Reactor Neutrino Experiments

Abstract

We propose to search for light $U(1)$ dark photons, $A^{\prime }$, produced via kinetically mixing with ordinary photons via the Compton-like process, $\gamma e^{-}\to A^{\prime }{e}^{-}$, in a nuclear reactor and detected by their interactions with the material in the active volumes of reactor neutrino experiments. We derive 95\% confidence-level upper limits on $\epsilon$, the $A^{\prime }$-$\gamma$ mixing parameter, $\epsilon$, for dark-photon masses below 1$\sim$MeV of $\epsilon <1.3\times 10^{-5}$ and $\epsilon <2.1\times 10^{-5}$, from NEOS and TEXONO experimental data, respectively. This study demonstrates the applicability of nuclear reactors as potential sources of intense fluxes of low-mass dark photons.

References in corpus (7)

• Sterile neutrino search at NEOS Experiment
• Probing Dark Forces and Light Hidden Sectors at Low-Energy e+e- Colliders
• Helioscope Bounds on Hidden Sector Photons
• Microwave Background Constraints on Mixing of Photons with Hidden Photons
• Signatures of a hidden cosmic microwave background
• Search for photon oscillations into massive particles
• New Experimental Limit on Photon Hidden-Sector Paraphoton Mixing

Cited by in corpus (14)

• Constraining Photon Portal Dark Matter with Texono and Coherent Data
• Dark Photon Decay Beyond The Euler-Heisenberg Limit
• Constraints on millicharged particles with low threshold germanium detectors at Kuo-Sheng Reactor Neutrino Laboratory
• Implications of the dark axion portal for the muon g-2, B-factories, fixed target neutrino experiments and beam dumps
• Severe Constraints on New Physics Explanations of the MiniBooNE Excess
• Constraints on hidden photons produced in nuclear reactors
• New searches at the reactor experiments based on the dark axion portal
• Light dark bosons in the JUNO-TAO neutrino detector
• Dark Photon Search at Yemilab, Korea
• Axionlike particles searches in reactor experiments
• New Directions for ALP Searches Combining Nuclear Reactors and Haloscopes
• Novel Search for Light Dark Photon in the Forward Experiments at the LHC
• Probing Dark Photons through Gravitational Decoupling of Mass-State Oscillations in Interstellar Media
• Dark photon manifestation in the triplet-like QED processes $\gamma +{\ell }_i\to {\ell }_j^{+}{\ell }_j^{-}+{\ell }_i$, $i\ne j,$ $i=e,\mu ,$ $j=e,\mu ,\tau$