Dark Photons from Nuclear Transitions

Abstract

Light new particles can be emitted in decays of excited nuclear states. Experiments analyzing such transitions and incorporating high-resolution detectors can be sensitive to new MeV-scale physics at a level competitive with upcoming collider and other fixed target experiments, provided sufficient luminosity. We demonstrate this in the case of the ${}^8\text{Be}$ system, showing that searches targeting the reported anomaly in ${}^8\text{Be}$ nuclear transitions can also be sensitive to currently unexplored regions of the canonical dark photon parameter space with 1 MeV $\lesssim m_{A^{\prime }}\lesssim 18$ MeV and ${\epsilon }^2\gtrsim 10^{-7}$. These experiments could be performed on a short timescale, at low cost, and directly probe both the hadronic and leptonic couplings of light hidden particles.

13 pages, 3 figures. Comments welcome!

References in corpus (13)

• U-boson production in e+e- annihilations, psi and Upsilon decays, and Light Dark Matter
• Particle Physics Models for the 17 MeV Anomaly in Beryllium Nuclear Decays
• US Cosmic Visions: New Ideas in Dark Matter 2017: Community Report
• Research Proposal for an Experiment to Search for the Decay μ -> eee
• Dark Sectors 2016 Workshop: Community Report
• The light U boson as the mediator of a new force, coupled to a combination of Q, B, L and dark matter
• Projections for Dark Photon Searches at Mu3e
• The Heavy Photon Search Test Detector
• Search for the dark photon and the dark Higgs boson at Belle
• Searching for a new force at VEPP-3
• Probing New Physics with Underground Accelerators and Radioactive Sources
• The DarkLight Experiment: A Precision Search for New Physics at Low Energies
• Recent results from NA48/2 and NA62 experiments at CERN