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arXiv · 2211.01854

Ultralight dark matter searches at the sub-Hz frontier with atom multigradiometry

Leonardo Badurina·Valerie Gibson·Christopher McCabe·Jeremiah Mitchell
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Abstract

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 1 mHz 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.

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Leonardo Badurina, Valerie Gibson, Christopher McCabe, Jeremiah Mitchell. 2022-11-03. Ultralight dark matter searches at the sub-Hz frontier with atom multigradiometry. https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevd.107.055002

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