Karlsruhe 2024 – scientific programme

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T: Fachverband Teilchenphysik

T 106: Search for new particles 7

T 106.1: Talk

Friday, March 8, 2024, 09:00–09:15, Geb. 20.30: 2.058

The Lohengrin Experiment at the ELSA Accelerator — •Matthias Hamer for the Lohengrin collaboration — Physikalisches Institut der Universität Bonn, Nussallee 12, 53115 Bonn

The particle nature of dark matter remains one of the great mysteries in elementary particle physics. The dark matter relic density constrains the masses of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) to values larger than a few GeV (Lee-Weinberg bound). With the negative results from collider and direct searches for WIMPs, so-called dark sector models with significantly lighter dark matter candidates have received increasing interest in the past years.
In some minimal models, the dark sector contains a new vector boson that mediates a new U(1) gauge interaction. This new vector boson couples to the dark matter particles, which are either scalars or fermions. In addition, it can mix with the SM electroweak gauge bosons, enabling a very weak coupling to electrically charged particles. The new mass eigenstate is called dark photon and it can, if the mixing is strong enough, be produced through a SM bremsstrahlung like process, e.g. by scattering electrons off a nuclear target.
In this talk I will present the layout and potential physics reach of a new experiment that we propose to set up at the ELSA accelerator in Bonn - the Lohengrin experiment. The discovery reach of the Lohengrin experiment will cover dark photon masses of up to 50  MeV and couplings that can fully explain the relic density for scalar and fermionic dark matter particles, exceeding current limits and projections for other experiments.

Keywords: Dark Matter; Dark Photon; ELSA Accelerator; Lohengrin