arXiv · 2605.17417
Collective response and noise of a levitated ferromagnet lattice for ultralight dark matter detection
Abstract
Ultralight dark matter can induce weak oscillating magnetic-like signals and can therefore be searched for with precision magnetometry. Levitated ferromagnets provide a sensitive platform for such searches, but a single ferromagnet is limited in total polarized spin and readout performance. We investigate a levitated ferromagnet lattice as a scalable detector for ultralight dark matter. We develop a theoretical description of the collective lattice response in the fully trapped regime, incorporating dipole-dipole interactions, finite-size effects, and boundary-induced mode mixing. We further analyze the collective noise budget and show that interaction effects mainly produce a narrow blind zone through thermal-noise amplification, while away from this region, the lattice preserves favorable collective noise scaling. We then derive projected sensitivities to axion-electron, dark-photon, and axion-photon couplings. We find that the lattice improves the reach in all three channels relative to a single-ferromagnet detector, with an additional coherent signal enhancement in the axion-photon channel from the lattice-generated electromagnetic background.
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Dongyi Yang, Xiao Yang, Chenxi Sun, Jianwei Zhang. 2026-05-17. Collective response and noise of a levitated ferromagnet lattice for ultralight dark matter detection. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.17417
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