Heavy Photon Displaced Vertex Search at 2.3GeV with Prospects for True Muonium Discovery
- Univ. of New Hampshire, Durham, NH (United States)
The Heavy Photon Search (HPS) collaboration at Jefferson Lab is searching for a new massive U(1) gauge boson known as the A', or dark photon, in the sub-GeV regime, which arises from considering an additional symmetry in the Standard Model. Though part of a hidden sector, the A' also kinetically mixes with the photon of electromagnetism, allowing it to have detectable QED decays. The signatures of this new particle in a fixed target experiment include a resonance in the e+e- invariant mass spectrum and a displaced vertex of its decay products, which the HPS detector in Hall B at JLab is equipped to detect. HPS is also sensitive to discover True Muonium (TM), an exotic bound state which has never been observed in experiment. In this dissertation, data taken from the 2016 HPS run at 2.3GeV beam energy is analyzed to search for a displaced decay vertex from an A'. The True Muonium yield is also estimated using Monte Carlo simulations, to determine the feasibility for a True Muonium search in future runs at 6.6GeV.
- Research Organization:
- Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (TJNAF), Newport News, VA (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Science (SC), Nuclear Physics (NP)
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC05-06OR23177; FG02-88ER40410
- OSTI ID:
- 1574119
- Report Number(s):
- JLAB-PHY-19-3079; DOE/OR/23177-4816
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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