Speaker
Description
The PRad-II and X17 Experiments are planned to run in Jefferson Lab’s Hall B in 2026. The common experimental setup includes a large-volume vacuum system, two planes of GEM tracking detectors for improved vertex and angle reconstruction, and a high-resolution calorimeter (HyCal). These experiments strive to give definite answers to long-standing questions in hadron physics. The X17 experiment is searching for a hypothetical light boson with a mass of about 17 MeV/c$^2$ that has been discussed to explain some anomalous nuclear transition data.
The HyCal could be re-used in the mid-term future as one of the calorimeter blocks for the Beam Dump eXperiment (BDX), an electron-beam thick-target experiment aimed to search for the existence of light Dark Matter particles in the MeV$-$GeV mass region at Jefferson Lab. BDX will be able to lower the exclusion limits by one to two orders of magnitude in the parameter space of dark-matter coupling versus mass.
