Speaker
Michelle Mesquita de Medeiros
(Argonne National Laboratory)
Description
SeaQuest/E906 is a fixed target experiment at Fermilab that uses the 120 GeV proton beam from the Main Injector to induce Drell-Yan interactions and study anti-quark distributions in the nucleon. The resulting dimuons from the Drell-Yan interactions between the beam and the targets travel through an iron magnet, which also serves as a beam dump, before reaching the spectrometer. In the absorption process in the dump many particles are produced, including, possibly, dark photons through processes such as proton bremsstrahlung and eta decay. The dark photons could decay into a dimuon that could be detected by the SeaQuest spectrometer further downstream. The distance between the creation of a dark photon and its decay is determined by its coupling to the EM sector. The decay vertex is therefore significantly displaced, allowing for a very low background search. By selecting these displaced vertex dimuons and analyzing the invariant mass distribution, we can search for a dark photon signature. We will be presenting the latest status of the dark photon search in the SeaQuest experiment. This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Nuclear Physics, under Contract No. DE-AC02-06CH11357.
Primary author
Michelle Mesquita de Medeiros
(Argonne National Laboratory)
