Laser experiments explore the hidden sector

By Markus Ahlers, H. Gies, J. Jaeckel, J. Redondo, A. Ringwald. 2007

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Recently, the laser experiments BMV and GammeV, searching for light shining through walls, have published data and calculated new limits on the allowed masses and couplings for axionlike particles. In this paper we point out that these experiments can serve to constrain a much wider variety of hidden-sector particles such as, e.g., minicharged particles and hidden-sector photons. The new experiments improve the existing bounds from the older BFRT experiment by a factor of 2. Moreover, we use the new PVLAS constraints on a possible rotation and ellipticity of light after it has passed through a strong magnetic field to constrain pure minicharged particle models. For masses $\ensuremath{\lesssim}0.05\text{ }\text{ }\mathrm{eV}$, the charge is now restricted to be less than $(3\ensuremath{-}4)\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}{10}^{\ensuremath{-}7}$ times the electron electric charge. This is the best laboratory bound and comparable to bounds inferred from the energy spectrum of the cosmic microwave background.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/84da03f6bc9de46c3f0568549c05fde4343f31de

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Citations in the corpus

New experimental approaches in the search for axion-like particles (2018, background): “These minicharged particles can have similar implications in astrophysics and cosmology [121, 126, 178, 179] than axions and ALPs, particularly in laser experiments [124].”
Dark radiation constraints on minicharged particles in models with a hidden photon (2013, background): “In the simplest realization [1, 2], the only new particle included is a gauge boson which has received many names: paraphoton [3], hidden photon [4] or dark photon [5] to name but a few.”
Probing dark forces and light hidden sectors at low-energy e+e- colliders (2009, background): “ U(1)D. For low-mass (MeV–GeV) dark photons A′, there are a variety of constraints on the kinetic mixing that are summarized in [35] (for a discussion of searches for even lower mass dark photons see [54, 55]). Constraints from Big-Bang Nucleosynthesis disfavor mA′ .O(few MeV) [56]. For mA′ .10 MeV,”
Illuminating the hidden sector of string theory by shining light through a magnetic field (2006, background): “Hidden-sector U(1) gauge bosons [6] and additional axion-like particles [34, 35], coupled to the minicharged fermions, may be observed in photon regeneration experiments [28, 29, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44] some of which have recently published data [45, 46].”
Cosmology and Fundamental Physics with the Euclid Satellite (2012, background): “More interestingly, [22, 525, 23] pointed out that photons propagating in a background magnetic field can actually pair-produce MCPs without the need for a second photon in the initial state.”
Testing string vacua in the lab: from a hidden CMB to dark forces in flux compactifications (2011, background): “Luckily, hidden photons in the meV range can be nicely searched for in purely laboratory based laser-light-shining-through-a-wall experiments [16, 17], such as ALPS [18], BMV [19], GammeV, LIPSS [20], and OSQAR (cf.”
Kinetic Mixing of the Photon with Hidden U(1)s in String Phenomenology (2008, methodology): “Figure 1: Upper limits on the kinetic mixing parameter χ versus the hidden-sector U(1) gauge boson mass mγ′ , from electroweak precision tests (EWPT) at LEP and future experiments at LHC and ILC [17, 18, 14], from searches for deviations of the Coulomb law [34, 35], and from searches for signatures ”
Any Light Particle Search II -- Technical Design Report (2013, background): “Photon-HP oscillations in LSW-experiments are reviewed in [8] and the oscillation probability for one oscillation (in either direction) γ ↔ γ ′ is given as [63]”
Massive hidden photons as lukewarm dark matter (2008, background): “Unfortunately, our hidden photons are too heavy to be measured in typical precision laboratory experiments; the 5th force searches or the laser experiments designed to search for axion like particles are very sensitive, but only for much lighter hidden photons [28–30].”
Exploring the Role of Axions and Other WISPs in the Dark Universe (2012, background): “For hidden photon searches, the magnetic field is not needed, since photons can oscillate into hidden photons already in field-free vacuum [120, 121, 122].”