New Observables for Direct Detection of Axion Dark Matter

By P. Graham, S. Rajendran. 2013

323 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We propose new signals for the direct detection of ultralight dark matter such as the axion. Axion or axionlike particle dark matter may be thought of as a background, classical field. We consider couplings for this field which give rise to observable effects including a nuclear electric dipole moment, and axial nucleon and electron moments. These moments oscillate rapidly with frequencies accessible in the laboratory, ∼ kilohertz to gigahertz, given by the dark matter mass. Thus, in contrast to WIMP detection, instead of searching for the hard scattering of a single dark matter particle, we are searching for the coherent effects of the entire classical dark matter field. We calculate current bounds on such time-varying moments and consider a technique utilizing NMR methods to search for the induced spin precession. The parameter space probed by these techniques is well beyond current astrophysical limits and significantly extends laboratory probes. Spin precession is one way to search for these ultralight particles, but there may well be many new types of experiments that can search for dark matter using such time-varying moments.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1199121802594fcd37f117ce1527152f3277c5cc

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

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Citations in the corpus

Search for Axionlike Dark Matter through Nuclear Spin Precession in Electric and Magnetic Fields (2017, background): “) [36–38], supernova energy-loss bounds (green, order of magnitude) [35,39,40], consistency with observations of galaxies (orange) [15,25–27], and laboratory searches for new spin-dependent forces (yellow, 95% C.”
Using the Full Power of the Cosmic Microwave Background to Probe Axion Dark Matter (2017, background): “Because of this symmetry structure, axions mediate no long range forces between matter, except in the presence of a spin-polarizing magnetic field (Moody & Wilczek 1984; Srednicki 1985; Graham & Rajendran 2013; Arvanitaki & Geraci 2014).”
Ultralight scalars as cosmological dark matter (2016, methodology): “This experiment is described, though not by that name, in section 5A of [34].”
The photo-philic QCD axion (2016, methodology): “A similar experimental setup, CASPER-wind [18], is also able to probe the axial couplings of the axion to quarks.”
The landscape of QCD axion models (2020, unknown): “(232) [434].”