Another stage of upgrade of NA64 facility completed
News, 04 August 2021
Last weekend, new equipment manufactured jointly by JINR, IHEP, and the Institute for Nuclear Research (Moscow) was successfully delivered to CERN from the Institute of High Energy Physics(Protvino).
Two calorimeters and a synchrotron radiation detector have been created as part of the upgrade of the NA64 experimental facility, the task of which is to search for manifestations of new physics – the dark sector on the electron and muon beams of the CERN SPS accelerator. The work has been carried out for two years with the support of a targeted grant from the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation.
JINR Director Grigory Trubnikov, JINR Scientific Leader Viсtor Matveev, INR Director Leonid Kravchuk, and IHEP Director Nikolay Tyurin congratulated the staff of the institutes mentioned above and members of the NA64 international collaboration, on the successful completion of this important stage.
At present, the project participants have started installing of the brought equipment in the NA64 experimental pavilion.
About NA64 Experiment
One of the SM expansions is the hidden sector model, which considers that the interaction between the SM and hidden particles can occur due to the exchange of the massive dark photon A’ as a result of its mixing with SM photon. If it is light, < 1 GeV, then search for such A' can be carried out at accelerators in experiments with high sensitivity.
The experiment with the primary goal to search for the A’ was proposed to the CERN SPSC (Super Proton Synchrotron and Proton Synchrotron Experiments Committee) in January 2014 and officially approved in 9 March 2016.
JINR actively participates in this research taking part in the theoretical support and experimental data analysis with responsibility on manufacturing, operation and support of the straw tube drift chambers for the spectrometer tracker.