Dark photon searches with atomic transitions

Abstract

Dark matter could be made up of dark photons, massive but very light particles whose interactions with matter resemble those of usual photons but suppressed by a small mixing parameter. We analyze the main approaches to dark photon interactions and how they can be applied to direct detection experiments which test different ranges of masses and mixings. A new experiment based on counting dark photons from induced atomic transitions in a target material is proposed. This approach appears to be particularly appropriate for dark photon detection in the meV mass range, extending the constraints in the mixing parameter by up to eight orders of magnitude with respect to previous experiments.

Imprint of ultralight vector fields on gravitational wave propagation

“…Regarding detection of ULVF DM, the possible indirect detection through the generation of induced atomic transitions was considered in [17], the use of optomechanical accelerometers as resonant detectors was explored in [18]. The generation of gravitational waves (GWs) associated to density perturbations was studied in [5].…”

Fate of scalar dark matter solitons around supermassive galactic black holes

“…The cosmological interest of these DM candidates is associated with the fact that their de Broglie wavelength is of the order of astrophysical scales [16]. This type of coherent DM is constituted of fast oscillating massive scalars [17,18] or other higher-spin bosonic fields [19][20][21][22]. For large distances, both at the background and perturbation levels, these coherent fields behave as Cold DM (CDM) does [18,[23][24][25][26][27].…”

The imprint of ultralight vector fields on gravitational wave propagation

“…Regarding detection of ULVF DM, the possible indirect detection through the generation of induced atomic transitions was considered in [12], the use of optomechanical accelerometers as resonant detectors was explored in [13]. On the other hand, the generation of gravitational waves associated to density perturbations was studied in [5].…”