Search for Leptonic Decays of Dark Photons at NA62

Abstract

The NA62 experiment at CERN, configured in beam-dump mode, has searched for dark photon decays in flight to electron-positron pairs using a sample of $1.4\times 10^{17}$ protons on dump collected in 2021. No evidence for a dark photon signal is observed. The combined result for dark photon searches in lepton-antilepton final states is presented and a region of the parameter space is excluded at 90% CL, improving on previous experimental limits for dark photon mass values between 50 and 600 MeV$/c^2$ and coupling values in the range $10^{-6}$ to $4\times 10^{-5}$. An interpretation of the $e^{+}{e}^{-}$ search result in terms of the emission and decay of an axion-like particle is also presented.

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Cited by in corpus (4)

• Searches for long-lived dark photons at proton accelerator experiments
• Search for hadronic decays of feebly-interacting particles at NA62
• PREFACE: A search for long-lived particles at the Large Hadron Collider
• Dark sector searches with high-intensity positron beams in the CERN North Area