English

How do you know if you ran through a wall?

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2013-05-30 v2 Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics Atomic Physics

Abstract

Stable topological defects of light (pseudo)scalar fields can contribute to the Universe's dark energy and dark matter. Currently the combination of gravitational and cosmological constraints provides the best limits on such a possibility. We take an example of domain walls generated by an axion-like field with a coupling to the spins of standard-model particles, and show that if the galactic environment contains a network of such walls, terrestrial experiments aimed at detection of wall-crossing events are realistic. In particular, a geographically separated but time-synchronized network of sensitive atomic magnetometers can detect a wall crossing and probe a range of model parameters currently unconstrained by astrophysical observations and gravitational experiments.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1205.6260,
  title  = {How do you know if you ran through a wall?},
  author = {M. Pospelov and S. Pustelny and M. P. Ledbetter and D. F. Jackson Kimball and W. Gawlik and D. Budker},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1205.6260},
  year   = {2013}
}

Comments

5 pages, 2 figure; to appear in the PRL

R2 v1 2026-06-21T21:10:40.883Z