Abstract
The nature of dark matter (DM) and its interaction with the Standard Model (SM) is one of the biggest open questions in physics nowadays. The vast majority of theoretically motivated ultralight-DM (ULDM) models predict that ULDM couples dominantly to the SM strong/nuclear sector. This coupling leads to oscillations of nuclear parameters that are detectable by comparing clocks with different sensitivities to these nature's constants. Vibrational transitions of molecular clocks are more sensitive to a change in the nuclear parameters than the electronic transitions of atomic clocks. Here, we propose the iodine molecular ion, I2+, as a sensitive detector for such a class of ULDM models. The iodine's dense spectrum allows us to match its transition frequency to that of an optical atomic clock (Ca+) and perform correlation spectroscopy between the two clock species. With this technique, we project a few-orders-of-magnitude improvement over the most sensitive clock comparisons performed to date. We also briefly consider the robustness of the corresponding "Earth-bound"under modifications of the ZN-QCD axion model.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 015008 |
| Number of pages | 14 |
| Journal | Physical Review D |
| Volume | 110 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 1 Jul 2024 |
Funding
We would like to thank Abhishek Banerjee, Melina Filzinger, Nitzan Akerman and Roee Ozeri for fruitful discussions and reading of this manuscript, Konstantin Springmann, Stefan Stelzl and Andreas Weiler for critical comments on the amelioration of the Earth bound, Marco Gorghetto and Surjeet Rajendran for further discussions, as well as Nathaniel Sherrill for providing the data of the Sr/Cs exclusion curves. Z. M. acknowledges the support of the Diane and Guilford Glazer Foundation Impact Grant for New Scientists, the Center for New Scientists at the Weizmann Institute of Science, the Edith and Nathan Goldenberg Career Development Chair, the Israel Science Foundation (1010/22), and the Minerva Stiftung with funding from the Federal German Ministry for Education and Research. The work of G. P. is supported by grants from the United States-Israel Binational Science Foundation (BSF) and the United States National Science Foundation (NSF), the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel research award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the German-Israeli Foundation for Scientific Research and Development (GIF), the Israel Science Foundation (ISF), the Minerva Stiftung, the SABRA—Yeda-Sela—WRC Program, the Estate of Emile Mimran, and the Maurice and Vivienne Wohl Endowment. The authors are grateful to the organizers and participants of the program “Particle & AMO physicists discussing quantum sensors and new physics 2023” at the Munich Institute for Astro-, Particle and BioPhysics (MIAPbP) which is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany’s Excellence Strategy—EXC-2094–390783311. Publisher Copyright: © 2024 American Physical Society.
All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes
- Nuclear and High Energy Physics