English

Earth as a transducer for ultralight bosonic dark-matter detection

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2026-07-16 v1 Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics

Abstract

Ultralight bosonic dark matter (UBDM) that couples to electromagnetism can generate an oscillating magnetic-field signal at the Earth's surface. This is referred to as the "Earth transducer" effect, as the Earth converts UBDM into a detectable magnetic field. Similar DM-induced fields in laboratory experiments typically scale with the size LL of the experiment. Because the Earth transducer signal instead scales with the large radius of the Earth, RR, it is one of the most powerful direct probes of UBDM with masses mDM1/R3×1014eVm_\mathrm{DM}\lesssim1/R\sim3\times10^{-14}\,\mathrm{eV}. It has many other favorable properties, such as high spatial and temporal coherence and robustness to atmospheric modeling. In this review, we derive the Earth transducer effect and its properties for multiple UBDM models, and discuss current and future prospects to detect it.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2607.16342,
  title  = {Earth as a transducer for ultralight bosonic dark-matter detection},
  author = {Saarik Kalia and Ibrahim A. Sulai},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.16342},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

18 pages, 4 figures