Searching for dilaton dark matter with atomic clocks

By A. Arvanitaki, Junwu Huang, K. Tilburg. 2014

293 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We propose an experiment to search for ultralight scalar dark matter (DM) with dilatonic interactions. Such couplings can arise for the dilaton as well as for moduli and axion-like particles in the presence of $CP$ violation. Ultralight dilaton DM acts as a background field that can cause tiny but coherent oscillations in Standard Model parameters such as the fine-structure constant and the proton-electron mass ratio. These minute variations can be detected through precise frequency comparisons of atomic clocks. Our experiment extends current searches for drifts in fundamental constants to the well-motivated high-frequency regime. Our proposed setups can probe scalars lighter than $1{0}^{\ensuremath{-}15}\text{ }\text{ }\mathrm{eV}$ with a discovery potential of dilatonic couplings as weak as $1{0}^{\ensuremath{-}11}$ times the strength of gravity, improving current equivalence principle bounds by up to 8 orders of magnitude. We point out potential $1{0}^{4}$ sensitivity enhancements with future optical and nuclear clocks, as well as possible signatures in gravitational-wave detectors. Finally, we discuss cosmological constraints and astrophysical hints of ultralight scalar DM, and show they are complimentary to and compatible with the parameter range accessible to our proposed laboratory experiments.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f30a32b5ce59e16d8d759a26ff299e1948f4e8b1

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

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Citations in the corpus

Highly charged ions: Optical clocks and applications in fundamental physics (2018, background): “…the fundamental constants at the Compton frequency of the cosmological field, or even random jumps when the Earth passes domain walls, or other topological defects, associated with such a field (Arvanitaki et al., 2015; Derevianko, 2016; Derevianko and Pospelov, 2014; Stadnik and Flambaum, 2015).”
Search for New Physics with Atoms and Molecules (2017, background): “Two specific examples from string theory are often cited as possible targets of searches: radions (Brans and Dicke, 1961), which are scalar bosons related to the radius of extra dimensions, and dilatons (Arvanitaki et al., 2015), which are scalar bosons that determine the interactions between partic”
Dark Matter Direct Detection with Accelerometers (2015, methodology): “Scalar dark matter coupling to photons or fermions can cause oscillations of fundamental parameters of the Standard Model, which may be searched for using atomic clocks [38, 56] or possibly resonant bars [39].”
Relaxion stars and their detection via atomic physics (2019, background): “(For earlier discussion in the context of dilaton DM see [15–17].”