2021/05/31 by Itay M. Bloch, Gil Ronen, Roy Shaham +3 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #hep-ph #hep-ex #physics.atom-ph #quant-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1126/sciadv.abl8919
published as Science Advances, Vol 8, Issue 5 (2022) · I.M.B. and G.R. contributed equally
arxiv created 2022/02/07 · arxiv updated 2022/02/08
We report on the first results of the Noble and Alkali Spin Detectors for Ultralight Coherent darK matter (NASDUCK) collaboration. We search for the interactions of Axion-Like Particles (ALPs) with atomic spins using an earth-based precision quantum detector as it traverses through the galactic dark matter halo. The detector is composed of spin-polarized xenon gas which can coherently interact with a background ALP dark matter field and an in-situ rubidium Floquet optical-magnetometer. Conducting a five months-long search, we derive new constraints on ALP-proton and ALP-neutron interactions in the 4× 10-15-4× 10-12~\rm eV/c2 mass range. Our limits on the ALP-proton (ALP-neutron) couplings improve upon previous terrestrial bounds by up to 3 orders of magnitude for masses above 4× 10-14~\rm eV/c2 (4× 10-13~\rm eV/c2). Moreover, barring the uncertain supernova constraints, the ALP-proton bound improves on all existing terrestrial and astrophysical limits, partially closing the unexplored region for couplings in the range 10-6~\rm GeV-1 to 2× 10-5~\rm GeV-1. Finally, we also cast bounds on pseudo-scalar dark matter models in which dark matter is quadratically-coupled to the nucleons.