Axion Dark Matter Search with Interferometric Gravitational Wave Detectors

Abstract

Axion dark matter differentiates the phase velocities of the circular-polarized photons. In this Letter, a scheme to measure the phase difference by using a linear optical cavity is proposed. If the scheme is applied to the Fabry-Pérot arm of Advanced LIGO-like (Cosmic-Explorer-like) gravitational wave detector, the potential sensitivity to the axion-photon coupling constant, gaγ, reaches gaγ 8 × 10 −13 GeV −1 (4 × 10 −14 GeV −1 ) at the axion mass m 3 × 10 −13 eV (2 × 10 −15 eV) and remains at around this sensitivity for 3 orders of magnitude in mass. Furthermore, its sensitivity has a sharp peak reaching gaγ 10 −14 GeV −1 (8×10 −17 GeV −1 ) at m = 1.563×10 −10 eV (1.563 × 10 −11 eV). This sensitivity can be achieved without loosing any sensitivity to gravitational waves.

DANCE: Dark matter Axion search with riNg Cavity Experiment

“…The expected limits from Axion Interferometry proposal with intra-cavity power of 1 MW [2], the expected integrated limits from ADBC experiment with intra-cavity power of 1 MW [3], and the expected sensitivity of Advanced LIGO with a scheme proposed in Ref. [5] are also shown with dashed lines for comparison.…”

“…Recently, several novel methods have been proposed to measure this modulated phase velocity difference using carefully designed optical cavities [2,4,3,5]. The phase velocity difference gives resonant frequency difference between two circular polarizations.…”

“…More recently, the authors of Ref. [5] have proposed the use of linear cavities in interferometric gravitational wave detectors to measure the modulation of the polarization angle. The sensitivity of this scheme drops off at low axion mass regions, but has sensitivity peaks when the round-trip light travel time for the cavity length is odd-multiples of the axion oscillation period.…”

Signals of axion like dark matter in time dependent polarization of light

“…We have proposed the Fourier-space analysis using the light from various astrophysical sources. We concentrated on the light from astrophysical sources, but a similar analysis may be performed in the proposed ALP search using optical cavity [58,59] or gravitational wave detector [60]. The discovery reach depends on the performance of the detector (i.e., the time required to observe the polarization of the light from a single sky patch and the size of the noise in the observation) as well as the period available for the observation.…”

Searching for Earth/Solar axion halos

“…A variety of experiments have been proposed to search for such DM candidates. Those experiments include axion haloscopes using microwave cavities [4][5][6], experiments exploiting magnetic resonance [7][8][9], interferometry [10][11][12][13], precision magnetometers and LC circuits [14][15][16][17][18], atomic transitions [19], searches for an oscillating neutron electric dipole moment [20], and many others (for a more complete list of axion dark matter detection experiments, see refs. [21,22] and references therein).…”