Searching for Dark Photon

 

Dr Haipeng An
California Institute of Technology
 

14 Mar 2017 (Tuesday)
2:00 pm
IAS4042, 4/F, Lo Ka Chung Building, Lee Shau Kee Campus, HKUST

One quarter of the energy density of our universe is composed of dark matter, whereas the particle nature of it is still mysterious. In recent years, motivated by a variety of unexplained astronomical signatures, the paradigm of weakly interacting dark matter supplied by a new long range force in the dark sector came to prominence. The simplest way to realize such a dark force is to introduce a light vector boson, the dark photon, in the dark sector. If the dark photon is light enough itself, it can also be a candidate of dark matter. My talk will focus on the physical consequences induced by the dark photon and how to search for it with current experiments.