Spin Correlations in Dark Photon Searches

ORAL

Abstract

The ForwArd Search ExpeRiment (FASER) searches for dark photons that are produced in the decays of neutral pions and eta mesons and decay into fermion-antifermion pairs. Dark photons are massive gauge bosons of broken U(1)D symmetry, presenting a remarkably simple extension to the standard model. Previous analyses have neglected spin correlations in signal event generation; however, because the dark photon has non-zero spin, such spin correlations exist. We analytically calculate the cross-section for these decays within the narrow-width approximation, and compare the results with and without spin correlations. We find that spin correlations are not a significant effect on existing dark photon searches.

*This work is supported in part by NSF Grant PHY-2210283.

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Publication: Planned paper: Spin Correlations in Dark Photon Searches with Jonathan Feng, Misa Toman and Eli Welch.

Presenters

  • Misa Z Toman

    • University of California, Irvine

Authors

  • Misa Z Toman

    • University of California, Irvine

  • Jonathan L Feng

    • University of California, Irvine

  • Eli M Welch

    • University of California, Irvine