2019/11/13 by C. Smorra, Y. V. Stadnik, P. E. Blessing +18
Computer Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Antimatter #Antiproton #Asymmetry #Baryon #Computational Physics and Python Applications #Coupling (piping) #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #Dark matter #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #Physics beyond the Standard Model #Scalar field dark matter #Standard Model (mathematical formulation) #astro-ph.CO #hep-ph #physics.atom-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1038/s41586-019-1727-9
published as Nature 575, 310 (2019) · 26 pages, 7 figures, including supplementary information
openalex publication_date 2019/11/13 · openalex created_date 2019/11/22 · arxiv created 2020/05/30 · arxiv updated 2020/06/02 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Astrophysical observations indicate that there is roughly five times more dark matter in the Universe than ordinary baryonic matter, with an even larger amount of the Universe's energy content due to dark energy. So far, the microscopic properties of these dark components have remained shrouded in mystery. In addition, even the five percent of ordinary matter in our Universe has yet to be understood, since the Standard Model of particle physics lacks any consistent explanation for the predominance of matter over antimatter. Inspired by these central problems of modern physics, we present here a direct search for interactions of antimatter with dark matter, and place direct constraints on the interaction of ultra-light axion-like particles - one of the dark-matter candidates - and antiprotons. If antiprotons exhibit a stronger coupling to these dark-matter particles than protons, such a CPT-odd coupling could provide a link between dark matter and the baryon asymmetry in the Universe. We analyse spin-flip resonance data acquired with a single antiproton in a Penning trap [Smorra et al., Nature 550, 371 (2017)] in the frequency domain to search for spin-precession effects from ultra-light axions with a characteristic frequency governed by the mass of the underlying particle. Our analysis constrains the axion-antiproton interaction parameter fa/C_p to values greater than 0.1 to 0.6 GeV in the mass range from 2 × 10-23 to 4 × 10-17 eV/c2, improving over astrophysical antiproton bounds by up to five orders of magnitude. In addition, we derive limits on six combinations of previously unconstrained Lorentz-violating and CPT-violating terms of the non-minimal Standard Model Extension.