Interference-assisted detection of dark photon using atomic transitions

Abstract

Dark photon is a massive vector particle which couples to the physical photon through the kinetic mixing term. Such particles, if exist, are produced in photon beams and, in particular, in laser radiation. Due to the oscillations between the physical photon and the dark photon, the latter may be, in principle, detected in the light-shining-through-a-wall experiment. We propose a variant of this experiment where the detection of dark photons is based on the atomic transitions. The key feature of this scheme is that the detection probability is first order in the coupling constant due to the interference term in the photon and dark photon absorption amplitudes. We expect that such experiment may give new constraints on dark photon coupling constant in the mass region $10^{-3}< m < 10^{-2}$ eV.