Single production of dark photon at the LHC

TL;DR

This paper investigates the potential to detect dark photons, predicted by models with hidden sectors, through single production at the LHC, focusing on the process where a dark photon and a photon are produced and decay into lepton pairs.

Contribution

It provides a detailed simulation study of dark photon production and detection prospects at the 14 TeV LHC, highlighting the feasibility of discovering dark photons via the $pp o Z_D o ll$ channel.

Findings

Potential detection of dark photon signals at the 14 TeV LHC.

Simulation results show distinguishable signals from background.

Discovery prospects depend on the dark photon mass and coupling.

Abstract

Many extensions of the SM contain hidden sectors which are uncharged under the SM gauge group. The simplest model with an additional $U(1)$ group predicts the existence of the new gauge boson, dark photon $Z_D$. In this work we consider single production of dark photon $Z_D$ at the LHC and study its discovery potential via the process $pp\rightarrow Z_D\gamma\rightarrow ll\gamma$. After simulating the signal as well as the relevant backgrounds, the numerical results show that the signal of $Z_D$ might be detected at the 14TeV LHC.