The Physics of the Dark Photon A Primer

This book is about the dark photon which is a new gauge boson whose existence has been conjectured. Due to its interaction with the ordinary, visible photon, such a particle can be experimentally detected via specific signatures. In this book, the authors review the physics of the dark photon from the theoretical and experimental point of view. They discuss the difference between the massive and the massless case, highlighting how the two phenomena arise from the same vector portal between the dark and the visible sector. A review of the cosmological and astrophysical observations is provided, together with the connection to dark matter physics. Then, a perspective on current and future experimental limits on the parameters of the massless and massive dark photon is given, as well as the related bounds on milli-charged fermions. The book is intended for graduate students and young researchers who are embarking on dark photon research, and offers them a clear and up-to-date introduction to the subject.

Marco Fabbrichesi works in high-energy theoretical physics. After graduating from the University of Virginia (USA), he has been a fellow at the JINR in Dubna (Russia), the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen (Denmark) and the Theory Division at CERN in Geneva (Switzerland). Currently, he is a researcher of the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics in Trieste. He has published more than 90 papers spanning from string theory, supersymmetry and dark matter physics to flavor physics, CP violation in the Kaon system and the hierarchy problem in the standard model.

Emidio Gabrielli works in high energy theoretical physics. After graduating in Physics at the University of Rome - Sapienza, in 1986, he received his PhD degree there in 1991. He is currently Associate Professor of Physics at the University of Trieste. Since 2012 he is also member of the CMS collaboration. He has held Senior Researcher positions at the Helsinki Institute of Physics (Finland 2000-2006) and NICPB Tallinn (Estonia 2011-2014), postdoc positions at the Theory Division of CERN, University of Notre-Dame Indiana (US), University Autonoma of Madrid (Spain). He has published more than 80 papers in peer-reviewed journals, spanning from standard model, supersymmetry, dark matter, flavor physics, quantum gravity, lattice and quantum field theory. He has one renowned paper on supersymmetry with more than 1000 citations.

Gaia Lanfranchi is a senior research scientist of the Laboratori Nazionali di Frascati (LNF) of INFN, currently based at CERN, working in experimental High Energy Physics. She has been a renowned expert of flavor physics and then moved her interest towards the physics of the dark sector. After graduating and obtaining her PhD at the University of Rome – Sapienza, in 1997, she joined the HEP experimental physics groups at LNF to work in KLOE (1997-2008), LHCb (2002-today), NA62 (2016-today), and SHiP (2014-today) experiments. She has held several leading positions and appointments in international advisory panels and committees. She serves as reviewer for several high-impact international journals and as referee for the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research, Swiss National Science Foundation, and UK-STFC. She has authored more than 750 papers in peer-reviewed international journals.