Searching for Ultralight Dark Matter with Optical Cavities

Andrew A Geraci; Colin Bradley; Dongfeng Gao; Jonathan Weinstein; Andrei Derevianko

doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.123.031304

Searching for Ultralight Dark Matter with Optical Cavities

Phys Rev Lett. 2019 Jul 19;123(3):031304. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.123.031304.

Authors

Andrew A Geraci¹, Colin Bradley², Dongfeng Gao³, Jonathan Weinstein², Andrei Derevianko²

Affiliations

¹ Department of Physics and Astronomy, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois 60208, USA.
² Department of Physics, University of Nevada, Reno, Nevada 89557, USA.
³ State Key Laboratory of Magnetic Resonance and Atomic and Molecular Physics, Wuhan Institute of Physics and Mathematics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan 430071, China.

PMID: 31386466
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.123.031304

Abstract

We discuss the use of optical cavities as tools to search for dark matter (DM) composed of virialized ultralight fields (VULFs). Such fields could lead to oscillating fundamental constants, resulting in oscillations of the length of rigid bodies. We propose searching for these effects via differential strain measurement of rigid and suspended-mirror cavities. We estimate that more than 2 orders of magnitude of unexplored phase space for VULF DM couplings can be probed at VULF Compton frequencies in the audible range of 0.1-10 kHz.