Speaker
Description
In this talk, I will present a novel method for probing Majoron dark matter using optical interferometry, such as that employed in gravitational wave detectors. The Majoron is a (pseudo-) Nambu-Goldstone boson that arises when a Majorana neutrino mass term is generated through the spontaneous breaking of a global Lepton symmetry, and has been proposed as a viable dark matter candidate in our universe. Although the original Majoron model did not include couplings to photons, a recent variant model has shown that Majoron can indeed couple to photons via a chiral anomaly [Q. Liang, X. P. Daz, T. T. Yanagida, Phys. Rev. Lett. 134, 151803 (2025)]. If such Majoron constitutes dark matter, it interacts differently with right- and left-handed polarizations of propagating light, leading to a small difference in phase velocity and inducing a rotation of the polarization direction. This rotation oscillates at a frequency determined by the Majoron mass, opening up the possibility of detecting the signal as a time-varying interference pattern using optical cavities. Optical interferometry, as employed in gravitational wave detectors, is among the most precise measurement techniques available and is capable of detecting extremely small changes in the phase velocity of laser beams. In our previous work, we demonstrated that the polarization rotation effect caused by axion dark matter can be detected using interferometric techniques, establishing a new direction for dark matter searches [I. Obata, T. Fujita, Y. Michimura, Phys. Rev. Lett. 121, 161301 (2018); K. Nagano, T. Fujita, Y. Michimura, I. Obata, Phys. Rev. Lett. 123, 111301 (2019)]. Interestingly, within the standard seesaw mechanism for neutrino masses, the expected Majoron dark matter mass lies in the range of 1e-14 eV to 1e-10 eV, corresponding to oscillation frequencies from a few Hz to kHz, which aligns precisely with the sensitive frequency band of gravitational wave detectors. In this talk, I will present the predicted parameter space for the Majoron dark matterphoton coupling and discuss the prospects for testing this interaction with current and upcoming gravitational wave experiments.
| Primary Abstract Topic | Theory: Axions and Wave-Like-DM |
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