Speaker
Description
We present a proposal for a future light dark matter search experiment at the Electron Stretcher Accelerator ELSA in Bonn: LOHENGRIN.
It employs the fixed-target missing momentum based technique to search for long-lived dark-sector particles.
The LOHENGRIN experiment uses a high rate single electron beam of 3.2 GeV that is extracted from the ELSA accelerator and shot onto a thin target to produce mainly Standard Model bremsstrahlung and - in rare occasions - possibly new particles coupling feebly to the electron.
A well-motivated candidate for such a new particle is the dark photon, a massive gauge boson that arises from a new gauge interaction in a dark sector and kinetically mixes with the hypercharge gauge boson.
The LOHENGRIN experiment is estimated to reach sensitivity to couplings small enough to explain the relic abundance of dark matter in various models for dark photon masses between approximately 1 MeV and 100 MeV.
In the talk we will address the current status of the experiment and show detailed theory calculations that are implemented in a dedicated Monte Carlo code, Lohengrin++.