20–25 Jul 2026
Asia/Shanghai timezone

Reactor Nuclear De-excitation as a Probe of MeV-Scale Dark Sectors

22 Jul 2026, 18:50
15m

Speaker

Yuanchao Lou (Nanjing normal university)

Description

Nuclear reactors provide intense neutron-capture environments and can act as controlled terrestrial sources of MeV-scale dark-sector particles. In this talk, I will discuss reactor-produced dark photons and dark matter from nuclear de-excitation. In the kinetically mixed vector-portal framework, excited nuclei can emit an on-shell vector mediator via N* -> N V, which can either decay visibly or invisibly into a dark matter pair. The visible-decay channel probes MeV-scale dark photons, while the invisible-decay channel produces a flux of sub-MeV dark matter.

Authors

Dr Liangliang Su (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology) Yuanchao Lou (Nanjing normal university) lei Wu (Nanjing Normal University)

Presentation materials

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