He says that the X-ray source at existing sites and a Geiger-Muller counter behind safety shielding could be used to compete with the ALPS (Any Light Particle Search) Experiment in Hamburg and other Light-Shining through a Wall (LSW) efforts at much lower cost. By leveraging standard synchrotron facilities, where X-rays are directed at matter, because they have an undulator, a light source passing through a magnetic field. Dr. Yin proposes a Geiger-Muller tube, one of the simplest means of detecting radiation and a typical part of safety monitoring.
Schematic view of the setup under consideration (left panel), which reflects a configuration typical of many synchrotron beamlines up to the first optical element. Throughout this Letter I take L1=30m. The mirror is aligned so that most photonlike states are directed into the experimental hutches. A magnified view of the mirror is shown (right panel). The axes relevant for studying the transmission of the dark-photonlike state are indicated. CC BY 4.0 CC BY 4.0
This is all on a computer, of course, but in his model he used a synchrotron beam through optics, safety shielding, and a standard Geiger-Muller counter, generating estimates for how many dark photons might be detected if they had certain properties. He believes this could yield upper limits on the “mixing parameter” governing dark photon-normal photon interactions. Assuming a dark photon mass of between 1 and 50 electronvolts, the limit found was less than 0.00001 times the strength of the interaction between normal photons, a much more stringent limit than any other LSW experiment purely run in a laboratory in the same mass range, in a role complementary to previous experiments.
Citation: Wen Yin, 'Novel Limits on Dark Photon Mixing from Radiation Safety', Phys. Rev. Lett. 136, 131803, Published 3 April, 2026 https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/snnn-wqxg
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