Speaker
Description
Twisted, helical "anyon" cavity resonators support bulk electromagnetic modes with nonzero helicity, a chiral property arising from the net parallel or antiparallel alignment of the eigenmode’s electric and magnetic fields. This property allows a single, monochromatic mode to couple directly to dark matter axions and convert them into amplitude-modulation sidebands via the axion-photon chiral anomaly, without requiring an external magnetic field. Removing this requirement allows such resonators to be built from superconducting materials, which reduce surface losses and substantially enhance sensitivity to axions with equivalent frequencies from DC to the cavity bandwidth. We propose a detection scheme for ultralight dark matter axions over the mass range $10^{-18}–10^{-13.7}$ eV, with projected limits determined assuming manufacture from bulk-niobium operated at superconducting temperatures, with an estimated sensitivity of $g_{a\gamma\gamma} < 10^{-11}$ GeV$^{-1}$ for an acquisition time of 3 months, reaching approximately one order of magnitude below the current exclusion limits set by CAST in this mass range. A microwave interferometric readout architecture is also described for detecting these axion-induced sidebands at this sensitivity limit, as well as potential improvements that could probe to lower exclusion limits.
| Primary Abstract Topic | Experiment: Axions and Wave-Like-DM |
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