While the LHC Hunts Higgs, the Jefferson Accelerator Looks to Illuminate Mysterious 'Dark Photons'
The Jefferson Lab The hunt for 'dark photons' is on. via Wikimedia While the Large Hadron Collider prepares to fire up its proton beams and get back to particle smashing, another accelerator is dialing up the search for another elusive particle. The Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in Virginia is turning up its electron beams in search of "dark" or "heavy" photons, and in doing so they hope to unlock the secrets of the so-called "dark sector" where things like dark matter are thought to live. The Jefferson Accelerator can't even come close to touching the high energies of the LHC, but its beams are extremely intense. And while the LHC is still the prime candidate to find certain theoretical particles like the Higgs Boson, some researchers are looking instead to the "intensity frontier" where high-intensity beams are used to create many, many lower-energy collisions at once. It is here that researchers...