We describe the current status of the DarkLight experiment at Jefferson Laboratory. DarkLight is motivated by the possibility that a dark photon in the mass range 10 to 100 MeV/c$^2$ could couple the dark sector to the Standard Model. DarkLight will
precisely measure electron proton scattering using the 100 MeV electron beam of intensity 5 mA at the Jefferson Laboratory energy recovering linac incident on a windowless gas target of molecular hydrogen. The complete final state including scattered electron, recoil proton, and e+e- pair will be detected. A phase-I experiment has been funded and is expected to take data in the next eighteen months. The complete phase-II experiment is under final design and could run within two years after phase-I is completed. The DarkLight experiment drives development of new technology for beam, target, and detector and provides a new means to carry out electron scattering experiments at low momentum transfers.
We give a short overview of the DarkLight detector concept which is designed to search for a heavy photon A with a mass in the range 10 MeV/c^2 < m(A) < 90 MeV/c^2 and which decays to lepton pairs. We describe the intended operating environment, the
Jefferson Laboratory free electon laser, and a way to extend DarkLights reach using A --> invisible decays.
The STAR experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) is in the process of designing and constructing a forward tracking system based on triple GEM technology. This upgrade is necessary to give STAR
the capability to reconstruct and identify the charge sign of W bosons over an extended rapidity range through their leptonic decay mode into an electron (positron) and a neutrino. This will allow a detailed study of the flavor-separated spin structure of the proton in polarized p + p collisions uniquely available at RHIC. The Forward GEM Tracker FGT will consist of six triple GEM disks with an outer radius of ~39 cm and an inner radius of ~10.5 cm, arranged along the beam pipe, covering the pseudo-rapidity range from 1.0 to 2.0 over a wide range of collision vertices. The GEM foils will be produced by Tech-Etch, Inc. Beam tests with test detectors using 10 cm x 10 cm Tech-Etch GEM foils and a two dimensional orthogonal strip readout have demonstrated a spatial resolution of 70 um or better and high efficiency.
