TY - JOUR
T1 - Ultralight dark matter searches at the sub-Hz frontier with atom multigradiometry
AU - McCabe, Christopher
AU - Badurina, Leonardo
AU - Mitchell, Jeremiah
AU - Gibson, Valerie
N1 - Funding Information:
We are grateful to members of the AION Collaboration for many fruitful discussions and to John Ellis for comments on the manuscript. C. M. acknowledges support from the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) Grants No. ST/T00679X/1 and No. ST/N004663/1. J. M. acknowledges support from the University of Cambridge Isaac Newton Trust. We are grateful to the STFC for funding contributions towards the AION-10 and MAGIS-100 experiments. No experimental datasets were generated by this research. L. B. acknowledges support from the Science and Technology Council (STFC) Grant No. ST/T506199/1.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 authors. Published by the American Physical Society. Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.
PY - 2023/3/3
Y1 - 2023/3/3
N2 - Single-photon atom gradiometry is a powerful experimental technique that can be employed to search for the oscillation of atomic transition energies induced by ultralight scalar dark matter (ULDM). In the sub-Hz regime, the background is expected to be dominated by gravity gradient noise (GGN), which arises as a result of mass fluctuations around the experiment. In this work, we model the GGN as surface Rayleigh waves, and we construct a likelihood-based analysis that consistently folds GGN into the sensitivity estimates of vertical atom gradiometers in the frequency window between 10-3 Hz and 1 Hz. We show that in certain geological settings GGN can be significantly mitigated when operating a multigradiometer configuration, which consists of three or more atom interferometers in the same baseline. Multigradiometer experiments, such as future versions of AION and MAGIS-100, have the potential to probe regions of scalar ULDM parameter space in the sub-Hz regime that have not been excluded by existing experiments.
AB - Single-photon atom gradiometry is a powerful experimental technique that can be employed to search for the oscillation of atomic transition energies induced by ultralight scalar dark matter (ULDM). In the sub-Hz regime, the background is expected to be dominated by gravity gradient noise (GGN), which arises as a result of mass fluctuations around the experiment. In this work, we model the GGN as surface Rayleigh waves, and we construct a likelihood-based analysis that consistently folds GGN into the sensitivity estimates of vertical atom gradiometers in the frequency window between 10-3 Hz and 1 Hz. We show that in certain geological settings GGN can be significantly mitigated when operating a multigradiometer configuration, which consists of three or more atom interferometers in the same baseline. Multigradiometer experiments, such as future versions of AION and MAGIS-100, have the potential to probe regions of scalar ULDM parameter space in the sub-Hz regime that have not been excluded by existing experiments.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85150935978&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1103/PhysRevD.107.055002
DO - 10.1103/PhysRevD.107.055002
M3 - Article
VL - 107
JO - Physical Review D - Particles, Fields, Gravitation and Cosmology
JF - Physical Review D - Particles, Fields, Gravitation and Cosmology
IS - 5
M1 - 055002
ER -