English

Probing dark matter with polarimetry techniques

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2023-05-03 v2 Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics

Abstract

In this work, we propose polarimetry experiments to search for low-mass (sub-eV) bosonic field dark matter, including axions and axion-like particles. We show that a polarimetry configuration consisting of a thick birefringent solid inside a Fabry-P\'erot cavity is exceptionally sensitive to scalar field dark matter, which may cause oscillatory variations in the solid's thickness and refractive index. In addition, we show that a reconfiguration of this polarimetry experiment, in which two quarter-wave plates are placed inside the Fabry-P\'erot cavity instead of a thick birefringent solid, is very sensitive to axion-like particles. We investigate the possibility of using cross-correlation of twin polarimeters to increase the sensitivity of the experiment, which in turn could allow us to explore unexplored parts of the parameter space and potentially detect a signal in either dark matter scenario.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2211.09922,
  title  = {Probing dark matter with polarimetry techniques},
  author = {Aldo Ejlli and Sander M. Vermeulen and Eyal Schwartz and Lorenzo Aiello and Hartmut Grote},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2211.09922},
  year   = {2023}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T06:10:13.370Z