Faculty Sponsor: Dr. Brandon Eberly
After years of an ongoing, unsuccessful search for weakly interacting massive particles, the possibility of the existence of lighter particles on the magnitude of a few GeV/c^2 has been growing as an area of study in dark matter. One such model of interest is the vector-portal dark matter model (VPDM), which proposes a light dark matter particle that interacts with ordinary matter via a dark photon mixing with a standard model photon. The project explores the possibility of detecting evidence for this general model with the MicroBooNE experiment at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. The parameter space of the dark matter interaction in which a single nucleon is ejected from the nucleus – neutral current elastic interaction channel – is explored through use of the ROOT data analysis software framework.