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 Physics at Virginia

"The Heavy Photon Search at JLAB "


Matt Solt , UVA - Department of Physics
[Host: Prof. Craig Group]
ABSTRACT:

The constituents of dark matter are still unknown, and the viable possibilities span a very large mass range. Specific scenarios for a thermal origin of dark matter sharpen this mass range to within about an MeV to 100 TeV. Most of the stable constituents of known matter have masses in the MeV to GeV range, and a thermal origin for dark matter works in a simple and predictive manner in this mass range as well, yet it remains largely unexplored. The Heavy Photon Search (HPS) at Jefferson Lab is a fixed target experiment that uses an electron beam to probe models of thermal dark matter involving sub-GeV dark photons. HPS searches for visibly decaying dark photons through two distinct methods - a resonance search in the e+e- invariant mass distribution and a displaced vertex search for long-lived dark photons. This seminar will give an overview of the theoretical motivations, the main experimental challenges and how they are addressed, the results for the 2016 Engineering Run, and future data and upgrades. In addition, an introduction to the Light Dark Matter eXperiment (LDMX), a planned next generation experiment at SLAC that will search for invisibly decaying dark photons through a missing-momentum experiment, will be presented.

High Energy Physics Seminar
Wednesday, March 15, 2023
4:00 PM
Ridley Hall, Room 179
Note special time.

Join Zoom Meeting: 
https://virginia.zoom.us/j/92287909487
Meeting ID: 922 8790 9487   Passcode: HEPseminar


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