Dissecting axion and dark photon with a network of vector sensors

Abstract

We develop formalisms for a network of vector sensors, sensitive to certain spatial components of the signals, to identify the properties of light axion or dark photon background. These bosonic fields contribute to vector-like signals in the detectors, including effective magnetic fields triggering the spin precession, effective electric currents in a shielded room, and forces on the matter. The interplay between a pair of vector sensors and a baseline that separates them can potentially uncover rich information of the bosons, including angular distribution, polarization modes, source localization, and macroscopic circular polarization. Using such a network, one can identify the microscopic nature of a potential signal, such as distinguishing between the axion-fermion coupling and the dipole couplings with the dark photon.

Vector wave dark matter and terrestrial quantum sensors

“…Our focus here is on the detection prospects of this kind of dark matter. Many dedicated studies have been conducted on the detection or exclusion of vectors [34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42] as well as scalars [35,39,[42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49]. However, for the vector case, the analyses focusing on the Fourier space signal did not fully account for the vector nature and stochastic aspects of the field in their statistical treatment, and nor did they model the effect of the rotation of the Earth [36,38].…”

Earth as a transducer for axion dark-matter detection

“…Using distributed networks of sensors 2 in this fashion carries many advantages (see, e.g., Refs. [73,74] for some recent discussions). This search can make use of the same public database maintained by the SuperMAG Collaboration [75,76] that was previously analyzed in Refs.…”