Searching for dark matter with a spin-based interferometer.
basic_science · Level V
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- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 40436853.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41467-025-60178-6 and PMC identifier 12119849.
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Abstract
Axion-like particles (ALPs) arise from well-motivated extensions to the Standard Model and could account for dark matter. ALP dark matter would manifest as a field oscillating at an (as of yet) unknown frequency. The frequency depends linearly on the ALP mass and plausibly ranges from 10<sup>-22</sup> to 10 eV/c<sup>2</sup>. This motivates broadband search approaches. We report on a direct search for ALP dark matter with an interferometer composed of two atomic K-Rb-<sup>3</sup>He comagnetometers, one situated in Mainz, Germany, and the other in Kraków, Poland. We leverage the anticipated spatio-temporal coherence properties of the ALP field and probe all ALP-gradient-spin interactions covering a mass range of nine orders of magnitude. No significant evidence of an ALP signal is found. We thus place new upper limits on the ALP-neutron, ALP-proton and ALP-electron couplings reaching below g<sub>aNN</sub> < 10<sup>-9</sup> GeV<sup>-1</sup>, g<sub>aPP</sub> < 10<sup>-7</sup> GeV<sup>-1</sup> and g<sub>aee</sub> < 10<sup>-6</sup> GeV<sup>-1</sup>, respectively. These limits improve upon previous laboratory constraints for neutron and proton couplings by up to three orders of magnitude.