Special Physics Seminar

Dark forces at the GeV scale

Bertrand Echenard

California Institute of Technology

Dark sectors, which introduce new particles neutral under the Standard Model, arise in many models of New Physics. These particles would only interact feebly with ordinary matter, and could easily have escaped detection in past experimental searches. This scenario has recently received much attention in the context of dark matter models, introducing dark sector particles charged under a dark force mediated by a new light vector boson. High-luminosity electron colliders and high-intensity fixed target experiments offer ideal environments to probe these possibilities. This talk will review the motivation and phenomenology of dark sectors, discuss recent results and future initiatives designed to search for these particles.