https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-025-14257-z
Regular Article - Experimental Physics
A proposal for the Lohengrin experiment to search for dark sector particles at the ELSA Accelerator
1
Physikalisches Institut, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, Nussallee 12, 53115, Bonn, NRW, Germany
2
IJCLab Orsay, CNRS/IN2P3, 15 rue Georges Clémenceau, 91405, Orsay, France
3
Werner-Heisenberg-Institut, Max-Planck-Institut für Physik (MPP), Boltzmannstraße 8, 85748, Garching, Bavaria, Germany
4
Instituto de Fisica Corpuscalar, Universitat de Valencia, Carrer del Vatedratic Jose Beltran Martinez 2, 46980, Valencia, Spain
5
DMLab, Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY, CNRS/IN2P3, Hamburg, Germany
6
Department of Materials Science and Engineering, NTNU Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Sem Saelands vei 12, 7034, Trondheim, Norway
a
bechtle@physik.uni-bonn.de
b
hamer@physik.uni-bonn.de
c
heinrichs@physik.uni-bonn.de
d
mar-schuermann@physik.uni-bonn.de
Received:
18
December
2024
Accepted:
2
May
2025
Published online:
31
May
2025
We present a proposal for a future light dark matter search experiment at the Electron Stretcher Accelerator ELSA in Bonn: Lohengrin. It employs the fixed-target missing momentum based technique for searching for dark-sector particles. The Lohengrin experiment uses a beam of electrons that is extracted from the ELSA accelerator and that is shot onto a thin target to produce mainly Standard Model bremsstrahlung and – in rare occasions – possibly new particles coupling feebly to the electron. A well motivated candidate for such a new particle is the dark photon, a new, possibly massive gauge boson arising from a new gauge interaction in a dark sector and mixing kinetically with the Standard Model photon. The Lohengrin experiment is estimated to reach sensitivity to couplings small enough to explain the relic abundance of dark matter in various models for dark photon masses between 
and 
.
© The Author(s) 2025
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Funded by SCOAP3.
