A Prototype Atom Interferometer to Detect Dark Matter and Gravitational Waves
Abstract
The AION project has built a tabletop prototype of a single-photon long-baseline atom interferometer using the 87Sr clock transition - a type of quantum sensor designed to search for dark matter and gravitational waves. Our prototype detector operates at the Standard Quantum Limit (SQL), producing a signal with no unexpected noise beyond atom shot noise. Importantly, the detector remains at the SQL even when additional laser phase noise is introduced, emulating conditions in a long-baseline detector such as AION or AEDGE where significant laser phase deviations will accumulate during long atom interrogation times. Our results mark a key milestone in extending atom interferometers to long baselines. Such interferometers can complement laser-interferometer gravitational wave detectors by accessing the mid-frequency gravitational wave band around 1 Hz, and can search for physics beyond the Standard Model.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2504.09158,
title = {A Prototype Atom Interferometer to Detect Dark Matter and Gravitational Waves},
author = {C. F. A. Baynham and R. Hobson and O. Buchmueller and D. Evans and L. Hawkins and L. Iannizzotto-Venezze and A. Josset and D. Lee and E. Pasatembou and B. E. Sauer and M. R. Tarbutt and T. Walker and O. Ennis and U. Chauhan and A. Brzakalik and S. Dey and S. Hedges and B. Stray and M. Langlois and K. Bongs and T. Hird and S. Lellouch and M. Holynski and B. Bostwick and J. Chen and Z. Eyler and V. Gibson and T. L. Harte and C. C. Hsu and M. Karzazi and C. Lu and B. Millward and J. Mitchell and N. Mouelle and B. Panchumarthi and J. Scheper and U. Schneider and X. Su and Y. Tang and K. Tkalcec and M. Zeuner and S. Zhang and Y. Zhi and L. Badurina and A. Beniwal and D. Blas and J. Carlton and J. Ellis and C. McCabe and G. Parish and D. Pathak Govardhan and V. Vaskonen and T. Bowcock and K. Bridges and A. Carroll and J. Coleman and G. Elertas and S. Hindley and C. Metelko and H. Throssell and J. N. Tinsley and E. Bentine and M. Booth and D. Bortoletto and N. Callaghan and C. Foot and C. Gomez-Monedero and K. Hughes and A. James and T. Leese and A. Lowe and J. March-Russell and J. Sander and J. Schelfhout and I. Shipsey and D. Weatherill and D. Wood and M. G. Bason and K. Hussain and H. Labiad and A. L. Marchant and T. C. Thornton and T. Valenzuela and S. N. Balashov and P. Majewski and D. Newbold and M. G. D. van der Grinten and Z. Pan and Z. Tam and I. Wilmut and K. Clarke and A. Vick},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.09158},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
V2: minor fixes of author list issues and references