Speaker
Description
The dark photon is a massive hypothetical particle that interacts with the Standard Model by kinetically mixing with the visible photon. For small values of the mixing parameter, dark photons can evade cosmological bounds and be a viable dark matter candidate. Due to the similarities with the electromagnetic signals generated by axions, several bounds on dark photons are simply reinterpretations of results from axion haloscopes. However, the dark photon has a property that the axion does not: an intrinsic polarisation. Due to the rotation of the Earth, accurately accounting for this polarisation is nontrivial, and highly experiment-dependent. However, if one does account for the rotation of the Earth, sensitivity to dark photons can be improved by over an order of magnitude. I will detail some of the strategies for searching for dark photon dark matter and provide some guidelines for optimising those searches given the unknown polarisation state of the dark photon around the Earth.
