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Abstract The search for a dark photon holds considerable interest in the physics community. Such a force carrier would begin to illuminate the dark sector. Many experiments have searched for such a particle, but so far it has proven elusive. In recent years the concept of a low mass dark photon has gained popularity in the physics community. Of particular recent interest is the 8 Be and 4 He anomaly, which could be explained by a new fifth force carrier with a mass of 17 MeV/ c 2 . The proposed Darklight experiment would search for this potential low mass force carrier at ARIEL in the 10-20 MeV/ c 2 e + e − invariant mass range. This proceeding will focus on the experimental design and physics case of the Darklight experiment. 

A<sc>bstract</sc> The pseudorapidity distribution of charged hadrons produced in Au+Au collisions at a center-of-mass energy of$$ \sqrt{{\textrm{s}}_{\textrm{NN}}} $$ $\sqrt{s_{\mathrm{NN}}}$= 200 GeV is measured using data collected by the sPHENIX detector. Charged hadron yields are extracted by counting cluster pairs in the inner and outer layers of the Intermediate Silicon Tracker, with corrections applied for detector acceptance, reconstruction efficiency, combinatorial pairs, and contributions from secondary decays. The measured distributions cover |η|<1.1 across various centralities, and the average pseudorapidity density of charged hadrons at mid-rapidity is compared to predictions from Monte Carlo heavy-ion event generators. This result, featuring full azimuthal coverage at mid-rapidity, is consistent with previous experimental measurements at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, thereby supporting the broader sPHENIX physics program.