New Experimental Limit on Photon Hidden-Sector Paraphoton Mixing

TL;DR

This study sets new experimental limits on photon-hidden sector paraphoton mixing using a light shining through a wall technique, improving sensitivity over previous measurements but finding no evidence of such mixing.

Contribution

First experimental search for photon-paraphoton mixing in the specified mass range with enhanced sensitivity using a generation-regeneration setup.

Findings

No evidence for photon-paraphoton mixing within the tested parameters.

New limits are approximately three times more sensitive than previous measurements.

The results constrain the parameter space for hidden-sector paraphotons.

Abstract

We report on the first results of a search for optical-wavelength photons mixing with hypothetical hidden-sector paraphotons in the mass range between 10^-5 and 10^-2 electron volts for a mixing parameter greater than 10^-7. This was a generation-regeneration experiment using the "light shining through a wall" technique in which regenerated photons are searched for downstream of an optical barrier that separates it from an upstream generation region. The new limits presented here are approximately three times more sensitive to this mixing than the best previous measurement. The present results indicate no evidence for photon-paraphoton mixing for the range of parameters investigated.