Diffractive photoproduction of dark photons

Dark photons serve as a portal to connect the dark and standard model sectors. Here, we propose photon-induced exclusive diffractive processes as a new tool to study the production of dark photons in current and future colliders. These processes join the strength of the strong force, yielding large cross sections, with the cleanliness of diffractive photoproduction, providing a clean experimental environment. Although the measurement would be extremely difficult, we identified a currently unexplored region around dark photon masses of 1 GeV/$c^2$ and coupling suppression $\varepsilon$ values around $10^{-4}$ where dark photons could be potentially found at the LHC.