The NA62 experiment at CERN, designed to study the ultra-rare decay K+ -> pi(+) nu(nu) over bar, has also collected data in beam-dump mode. In this configuration, dark photons may be produced by protons dumped on an absorber and reach a decay volume beginning 80 m downstream. A search for dark photons decaying in flight to mu(+) mu(-) pairs is reported, based on a sample of 1.4 x 10(17) protons on dump collected in 2021. No evidence for a dark photon signal is observed. A region of the parameter space is excluded at 90% CL, improving on previous experimental limits for dark photon masses between 215 and 550MeV/c(2).
Rakesh Chawla, Andrea Rizzi, Matthias Finger, Federica Legger, Matteo Galli, Sun Hee Kim, João Miguel das Neves Duarte, Tagir Aushev, Hua Zhang, Alexis Kalogeropoulos, Yixing Chen, Tian Cheng, Ioannis Papadopoulos, Gabriele Grosso, Valérie Scheurer, Meng Xiao, Qian Wang, Michele Bianco, Varun Sharma, Joao Varela, Sourav Sen, Ashish Sharma, Seungkyu Ha, David Vannerom, Csaba Hajdu, Sanjeev Kumar, Sebastiana Gianì, Kun Shi, Abhisek Datta, Siyuan Wang, Anton Petrov, Jian Wang, Yi Zhang, Muhammad Ansar Iqbal, Yong Yang, Xin Sun, Muhammad Ahmad, Donghyun Kim, Matthias Wolf, Anna Mascellani, Paolo Ronchese, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Eduardo Sanchez, Zhifeng Ding, Sun Hee Kim, Hua Zhang, Stewart Cole, Jiangyan Yang, Jean-Paul Richard Kneib, Anand Stéphane Raichoor, Andrei Variu, Ting Tan, Daniel Felipe Forero Sanchez, Cheng Zhao, Arjun Dey, David Schlegel, Zheng Zheng, Xin Chen