Axion-like particles (ALPs) arise from well-motivated extensions to the Standard Model and could account for the dark matter. We discuss the scaling of the sensitivity of a galactic ALP dark matter search with the number of sensors, especially in the ultra-light mass regime, where the measurement time is shorter than the coherence time of the ALP field. We compare multiple schemes for daily modulated ALP gradient signals, and show that increasing the number of sensors from 1 to 2 improves the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) by a factor of 2-3. For more than two sensors, the SNR increases as the square root of the number of sensors. Then, we show that splitting the data into subsets and then averaging its Discrete Fourier Transforms (DFTs) is equivalent to the DFT of the whole dataset in terms of SNR.
@article{arxiv.2504.12815,
title = {Notes on optimizing a multi-sensor gradient axion-like particle dark matter search},
author = {Daniel Gavilan-Martin and Grzegorz Łukasiewicz and Derek F. Jackson Kimball and Szymon Pustelny and Dmitry Budker and Arne Wickenbrock},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.12815},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
Proceedings of the second general meeting of the Cost Action CA21106