Searching for dark matter with a spin-based interferometer
- Daniel Gavilan-Martin
- Grzegorz Łukasiewicz
- Mikhail Padniuk
- Emmanuel Klinger
- Magdalena Smolis
- Nataniel L. Figueroa
- Derek F. Jackson Kimball
- Alexander O. Sushkov
- Szymon Pustelny
- Dmitry Budker
- Arne Wickenbrock
2025-05-28
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 −22 to 10 eV/ c 2 . This motivates broadband search approaches. We report on a direct search for ALP dark matter with an interferometer composed of two atomic K-Rb- 3 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 a N N < 10 −9 GeV −1 , g a P P < 10 −7 GeV −1 and g a e e < 10 −6 GeV −1 , respectively. These limits improve upon previous laboratory constraints for neutron and proton couplings by up to three orders of magnitude.