31 July 2017 to 4 August 2017
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
US/Central timezone

Search for invisible decay of a dark photon produced in $e^+e^-$ collisions at BaBar

1 Aug 2017, 14:15
15m
Hornets Nest (Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory)

Hornets Nest

Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory

Presentation Dark Matter Dark Matter

Speaker

Dr Tomonari Miyashita (California Institute of Technology)

Description

We report on a search for single-photon events in 53 $fb^{-1} of $e^+e^- $ collision data collected with the BaBar detector at the PEP-II $B$-factory. We look for events with a single high-energy photon and a large missing momentum and energy, consistent with production of a spin-1 particle $A’$ through the process $e^+e^- \to \gamma A’$, $A’ \to invisible$. Such particles, referred to as “dark photons”, are motivated by theories applying a $U(1)$ gauge symmetry to dark matter. We find no evidence for such processes and set 90\% confidence level upper limits on the coupling strength of $A’ \to e^+e^-$ for a dark photon with a mass lower than 8 GeV. In particular, our limits exclude the values of the $A’$ coupling suggested by the dark-photon interpretation of the muon (g-2) anomaly, as well as a broad range of parameters.

Primary author

Prof. Frank Porter (Caltech)

Co-author

Presentation materials