Speaker
Description
The Heavy Photon Search (HPS) experiment was conceived to search for a light new vector boson A’ that is kinetically mixed with the photon and has a kinetic mixing parameter $ε^2 > 10^{-10}$. A vector boson with a mass in the 20-220 MeV/c$^2$ range could also mediate interactions between the Standard Model and light thermal dark matter. HPS searches for visible signatures of heavy photons in electroproduction reactions induced on a fixed Tungsten target exploiting the electron beam provided by the JLAB CEBAF machine, which can reach a maximum energy of 12 GeV. These studies of the low mass region complement the exploration of weakly coupled (and possibly new) physics presently performed at the LHC and other high-energy machines.
The HPS search is based on a two-fold approach. First, due to their small coupling to the electric charge, heavy photons should be produced in bremsstrahlung-like processes and could therefore be observed by HPS in their e+e- decay channel, over a huge QED background. Second, HPS can also perform precise decay lengths measurements, which provide information on long-lived bosons featuring small couplings.
After the completion of two engineering runs in 2015 and 2016, HPS is currently in full steam, with the analysis of the datasets collected in 2016, 2019 and 2021 presently ongoing.
In this talk, an overview of the results achieved so far by HPS will be presented.
| In-person participation | Yes |
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