First observation with global network of optical atomic clocks aimed for a dark matter detection
Abstract
We report on the first earth-scale quantum sensor network based on optical atomic clocks aimed at dark matter (DM) detection. Exploiting differences in the susceptibilities to the fine-structure constant of essential parts of an optical atomic clock, i.e. the cold atoms and the optical reference cavity, we can perform sensitive searches for dark matter signatures without the need of real-time comparisons of the clocks. We report a two orders of magnitude improvement in constraints on transient variations of the fine-structure constant, which considerably improves the detection limit for the standard model (SM) - DM coupling. We use Yb and Sr optical atomic clocks at four laboratories on three continents to search for both topological defect (TD) and massive scalar field candidates. No signal consistent with a dark-matter coupling is identified, leading to significantly improved constraints on the DM-SM couplings.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1806.04762,
title = {First observation with global network of optical atomic clocks aimed for a dark matter detection},
author = {P. Wcisło and P. Ablewski and K. Beloy and S. Bilicki and M. Bober and R. Brown and R. Fasano and R. Ciuryło and H. Hachisu and T. Ido and J. Lodewyck and A. Ludlow and W. McGrew and P. Morzyński and D. Nicolodi and M. Schioppo and M. Sekido and R. Le Targat and P. Wolf and X. Zhang and B. Zjawin and M. Zawada},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1806.04762},
year = {2019}
}