Baryonic dark forces in electron-beam fixed-target experiments

Abstract: New GeV-scale dark forces coupling predominantly to quarks offer novel signatures that can be produced directly and searched for at high-luminosity colliders. We compute the photon-proton and electron-proton cross sections for producing a GeV-scale gauge boson arising from a $U(1)_B$ gauge symmetry. Our calculation relies on vector meson dominance and a phenomenological model for diffractive scattering used for vector-meson photoproduction. The parameters of our phenomenological model are fixed by performing a Markov Chain Monte Carlo fit to existing exclusive photoproduction data for $\omega$ and $\phi$ mesons. Our approach can be generalized to other GeV-scale dark gauge forces.