Light hidden photon production in high energy collisions

Abstract

The visible and dark sectors of particle physics can be connected via kinetic mixing between ordinary and hidden photons. If the latter is light its production in high energy collisions of ordinary particles proceeds via oscillations with ordinary photons similarly to the neutrino processes. Generically, the experiments are insensitive to mass of the hidden vector, if it is lighter than 1\,MeV, and it does not decay into $e^+e^-$-pair. Still, one can use the missing energy and scattering off the detector material as signatures to search for the light vectors. Presence of media suppresses production of the light vectors making the experiments insensitive to the entire model. We present analytic formulas for the light hidden photon production, propagation and detection valid for searches at colliders and beam-target experiments and apply them to estimate the impact on the sensitivities of a set of experiments --- NA64, FASER, MATHUSLA, SHiP, T2K, DUNE, NA62 --- in a zero-background case.