[Jlab-seminars] Today's Physics Seminar: Omar Moreno; “First Results from HPS”

[Stephanie Tysor]

Physics Seminar 

Omar Moreno: SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory 



“ First Results from HPS ” 



Wednesday, May 3 , 2017 

2:30 pm 

Auditorium 



Abstract: 



The Heavy Photon Search (HPS) experiment at Jefferson Lab is searching for a new U(1) vector boson (“heavy photon", “dark photon" or A’) in the mass range of 20-500 MeV/c 2 . An A’ in this mass range is theoretically favorable and may also mediate dark matter interactions. The A’ couples to the ordinary photon through kinetic mixing, which induces its coupling to electric charge. Since heavy photons couple to electrons, they can be produced through a process analogous to bremsstrahlung and subsequently decay to an e + e - , which can be observed as a narrow resonance above the dominant QED trident background. For suitably small couplings, heavy photons travel detectable distances before decaying, providing a second signature. Using the CEBAF electron beam at Jefferson Lab incident on a thin tungsten target, along with a compact, large acceptance forward spectrometer consisting of a silicon vertex tracker and lead tungstate electromagnetic calorimeter, HPS is accessing unexplored regions in the mass-coupling phase space. An HPS engineering run took place in experimental Hall B during spring of 2015 using a 1.056 GeV, 50 nA beam and collected 1165 nb -1 (7.29 mC) of data. This talk will present the results of a resonance search for a heavy photon using this data . 

-- 
Stephanie Tysor 
Hall A Administrative Assistant 
Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility 
(office)757-269-6005 (fax)757-269-5235 
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