Millicharged particles

Dobroliubov, M.I.; Ignatiev, A. Yu.

doi:10.1103/physrevlett.65.679

Cited by 95 publications

(90 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…Figure 4 shows a graph of charge vs. mass and shaded regions of charge-mass combinations that have been excluded so far by other experiments. 4,7 Shown are regions excluded due to the most precise measurement of the Lamb Shift, and three regions excluded because of particle physics experiments: Mel Schwartz's SLAC Beam Dump experiment, the Fermilab E613 experiment, and the ASP Free Also shown are two regions excluded based on cosmological grounds. Masses below 1 MeV are excluded because of the e ect the existence of mQ particles would have o n n ucleosynthesis: if mQ particles had a very small mass, they would have caused the universe to have cooled more rapidly, and nuclei would have started forming earlier, giving fewer free neutrons the chance to decay, which i n turn would give rise to a higher He abundance than is currently observed.…”

Section: Shadow Universesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…4,7 They are also not forbidden by established physical principles. In fact, charge quantization is poorly understood, and there is no a-priori reason to assume that all particles need to have a c harge that is an integer multiple of e=3.…”

Section: Why Look For Them?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Some of the theoretical motivation 2;3 involves the concept of shadow universes," but the main motivation for the experiment is the fact that milli-charged particles are not excluded experimentally in a large area of the mass vs. charge plane. 4,7 Section 3 gives the presumed experimental signature for milli-charged particles and explains why SLAC is an ideal location to search for them. A discussion of possible backgrounds follows, and the experimental setup is described in detail.…”

Section: Overviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Search for Milli-Charged Particles at SLAC

Langeveld¹

2003

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Particles with electric charge q Qe 10 ,3 e and masses in the range 1 1000 MeV c 2 are not excluded by present experiments or by astrophysical or cosmological arguments. A beam dump experiment uniquely suited to the detection of such milli-charged" particles has been carried out at SLAC, utilizing the short-duration pulses of the SLC electron beam to establish a tight coincidence window for the signal. The detector, a large scintillation counter sensitive to very small energy depositions, provided much greater sensitivity than previous searches. Analysis of the data leads to the exclusion of a substantial portion of the charge-mass plane. In this report, a preliminary mass-dependent upper limit is presented for the charge of milli-charged particles, ranging from Q = 1 : 7 10 ,5 at milli-charged particle mass 0.1 MeV c 2 to Q = 9 : 5 10 ,4 at 100 MeV c 2 .

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Section: Shadow Universesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Why Look For Them?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Overviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Search for Milli-Charged Particles at SLAC

Langeveld¹

2003

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“…Although charged dark matter is strongly constrained [1], particles with magnetic and/or electric dipole moments [2], axions [3] and millicharged dark matter [4] are viable dark matter candidates. Another dark matter candidate that can couple to the electromagnetic field is mirror matter.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Detecting dark matter in electromagnetic field penetration experiments

Mitra

2006

Phys. Rev. D

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Dark matter in the form of particles from a hidden mirror sector has recently been proposed as an explanation for the DAMA annual modulation signal. Here one assumes that there exists a small mixing between photons and mirror photons. We show that dark matter with this property can also be detected in electromagnetic field penetration experiments. Such experiments can be used to measure the speed and direction of the dark matter halo wind, the local density, the temperature, and the strength of the photon-mirror photon mixing interaction. An additional result would be a significant improvement of the upper limit on the photon mass.PACS numbers: 95.35.+d

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“…For one thing, the apparently much stronger astrophysical and cosmological bounds [5][6][7][8][9][10] (for a recent review, see Ref.…”

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confidence: 99%

Accelerator cavities as a probe of millicharged particles

Gies

Jaeckel²,

Ringwald³

2006

Europhys. Lett.

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Abstract. -We investigate Schwinger pair production of millicharged fermions in the strong electric field of cavities used for particle accelerators. Even without a direct detection mechanism at hand, millicharged particles, if they exist, contribute to the energy loss of the cavity and thus leave an imprint on the cavity's quality factor. Already conservative estimates substantially constrain the electric charge of these hypothetical particles; the resulting bounds are competitive with the currently best laboratory bounds which arise from experiments based on polarized laser light propagating in a magnetic field. We propose an experimental setup for measuring the electric current comprised of the millicharged particles produced in the cavity.Strong electromagnetic fields offer a new window to particle physics. Experiments involving strong fields have a new-physics discovery potential which is partly complementary to accelerator experiments. For instance, experiments such as BFRT [1], CAST [2], or PVLAS [3], using strong magnetic fields, are involved in the search for light, weakly coupled particles such as axions.Usually, particle physics effects in strong fields result from the the macroscopic spatial extent of the fields which can support coherent phenomena. If the mass of the new particles is sufficiently low, yet another set of mechanisms opens up new phenomenological possibilities: processes can become non-perturbative in the external field, leading to significant enhancements or increase of phase space. In a recent work [4], we have shown that the search for birefringence and dichroism of polarized laser light propagating in a strongly magnetized vacuum [1,3] gives the currently best laboratory bounds on the charge of millicharged particles. For these bounds, the nonperturbative account for the magnetic field is crucial.We would like to stress that improved constraints on millicharged particles are very welcome. For one thing, the apparently much stronger astrophysical and cosmological bounds [5][6][7][8][9][10] (for a recent review, see Ref.[11]) have recently been shown to be quite model dependent [12]. On the other hand, millicharged particles arise naturally in a large class of standard model extensions [13][14][15][16][17], most notably in a bottom-up approach to the string embedding of the standard model [15,18,19]. Therefore, searches for millicharged particles are a powerful tool to probe fundamental physics.

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Millicharged particles

Cited by 95 publications

References 30 publications

Search for Milli-Charged Particles at SLAC

Search for Milli-Charged Particles at SLAC

Detecting dark matter in electromagnetic field penetration experiments

Accelerator cavities as a probe of millicharged particles

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