29 March 2023 to 1 April 2023
UCLA
US/Pacific timezone

A signal search for the dark axion portal in the NEON experiment

29 Mar 2023, 19:17
1m
Faculty Center

Faculty Center

Speaker

Byoung-cheol KOH

Description

Neutrino Elastic scattering Observation with NaI (NEON) is in progress at the Hanbit nuclear power plant in Yeonggwang, South Korea. The NEON experiment consists of 15 kg of target crystals immersed in 700 liters of scintillating liquid, and located at 24 meters from the 2.8 GW reactor core. The main goal of NEON is to observe the reactor electron anti-neutrino coherent scattering (CEvNS) using NaI(Tl) crystal detectors. NEON's CEvNS observation requires a very low energy threshold of less than 0.5 keV with a precise understanding of the detector and surrounding environment. While accumulating sufficient data and developing an optimal analysis for the CEvNS measurement, we perform a search for dark axion portal (DAP) signals where an axion couples with a dark photon and an electron with a relatively higher threshold. Being exposed to a high flux in a large amount of liquid scintillator, the detector is poised to be highly sensitive to the DAP signals. In this poster, an overview of the NEON experiment and an analysis strategy for DAP are introduced.

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