Hunting The Dark Sector On The Cheap

A short review of the effort to hunt for the hypothetical "dark" photons at JLab, and doing it with a minuscule budget when compared to other elementary particle physics experiments.

The HPS researchers at the Jefferson Lab are quick to concede that the experiment, like two others at the lab probing this dark sector, is a long shot that is likely to achieve little more than null results. But the reasonable price tags for such projects — about US$3 million to build and run the HPS detector — have prompted more physicists to try. “It’s always a great question in physics to go around wondering if there are more fundamental forces,” says physicist John Jaros, co-spokesman for the HPS experiment.

Good luck to them. It's a long shot, but as with many of these things, one tends to learn something new even when no discovery is made.

Zz.