Searching for galactic axions through magnetized media: the QUAX proposal

By R. Barbieri, C. Braggio, G. Carugno, C. S. Gallo, A. Lombardi, A. Ortolan, R. Pengo, G. Ruoso, C. Speake. 2016

167 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present a proposal to search for QCD axions with mass in the 200 $\mu$eV range, assuming that they make a dominant component of dark matter. Due to the axion-electron spin coupling, their effect is equivalent to the application of an oscillating rf field with frequency and amplitude fixed by the axion mass and coupling respectively. This equivalent magnetic field would produce spin flips in a magnetic sample placed inside a static magnetic field, which determines the resonant interaction at the Larmor frequency. Spin flips would subsequently emit radio frequency photons that can be detected by a suitable quantum counter in an ultra-cryogenic environment. This new detection technique is crucial to keep under control the thermal photon background which would otherwise produce a too large noise.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/eff96da526e607cf3801100b5adf03c38a4ae9ef

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Citations in the corpus

The landscape of QCD axion models (2020, methodology): “ABRACADABRA [291] A Broadband/Resonant Approach to Cosmic Axion Detection ADMX [505] Axion Dark Matter Experiment ALPS (II) [504] Any Light Particle Search (II) ARGUS [566] A Russian-German-United States-Swedish Collaboration ARIADNE [448] Axion Resonant InterAction Detection Experiment ATLAS [695] ”
More axions from strings (2020, background): “In particular, they motivate efforts to further explore a region of parameter space that could in principle be probed by astrophysics, as well as axion dark matter [54–57] and non dark matter [58–60] experiments.”
Stellar recipes for axion hunters (2017, background): “searches for induced atomic transitions [102, 103], searches for electron spin precession in the galactic axion dark matter wind, such as QUAX [104], and searches for axion dark matter absorption on a conduction electron, followed by emission of an athermal phonon, in a superconductor [105], may als”
New experimental approaches in the search for axion-like particles (2018, methodology): “The QUAX experiment considers detecting ALP DM via the electron coupling using magnetic materials [599].”
Standard Model—axion—seesaw—Higgs portal inflation. Five problems of particle physics and cosmology solved in one stroke (2016, methodology): “The latter coupling may be probed in the corresponding axion mass window by the axion dark matter experiment QUAX [213], the fifth force experiment”
Galactic axions search with a superconducting resonant cavity (2019, methodology): “This activity has been done within the QUAX experiment, which searches DM axions using a ferromagnetic haloscope [16, 17].”
The Dark Photon (2020, background): “…dipole operator scales as the CM energy in the process and higher energies make it more and more relevant; • Magnons: An interesting possibility is the use of magnons in ferromagnetic materials and their interaction with dark photons (QUAX proposal) (Barbieri et al., 2017; Chigusa et al., 2020).”