Speaker
Description
We describe the readout system electronics used for detection of amplitude modulation sidebands induced by ultralight axions in a twisted anyon cavity. A twisted cavity with asymmetrical boundary conditions proposed in (Bourhill et al. 2023) was shown to generate helical radiation in a single eigenmode. That is, a single mode has a non-zero $\vec{E}\cdot \vec{B}$ product, hence can act as both the background and readout mode for interaction with axion dark matter. The authors showed that such a cavity driven with a sinusoidal microwave pump field experiences amplitude modulation sidebands due to upconversion of ultralight axions.
In this work, we design an interferometric readout system capable of turning this small amplitude modulation into a detectable output voltage. Taking into account both electronics noise contributions and existing pump amplitude noise we derive the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of a realistic experiment. We describe how this system design maximises sensitivity to the axion signal while minimising sensitivity to background noise. Finally we see, that using readily available electronics, an experiment with a high quality twisted anyon cavity may soon result in the most sensitive direct detection experiment for ultralight axion dark matter to date.
| Primary Abstract Topic | Experiment: Axions and Wave-Like-DM |
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