Experimental Constraint on Axionlike Particles over Seven Orders of Magnitude in Mass

Tanya S Roussy; Daniel A Palken; William B Cairncross; Benjamin M Brubaker; Daniel N Gresh; Matt Grau; Kevin C Cossel; Kia Boon Ng; Yuval Shagam; Yan Zhou; Victor V Flambaum; Konrad W Lehnert; Jun Ye; Eric A Cornell

doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.126.171301

Experimental Constraint on Axionlike Particles over Seven Orders of Magnitude in Mass

Phys Rev Lett. 2021 Apr 30;126(17):171301. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.126.171301.

Authors

Tanya S Roussy^{1

2}, Daniel A Palken^{1

2}, William B Cairncross^{1

2}, Benjamin M Brubaker^{1

2}, Daniel N Gresh^{1

2}, Matt Grau^{1

2}, Kevin C Cossel^{1

2}, Kia Boon Ng^{1

2}, Yuval Shagam^{1

2}, Yan Zhou^{1

2}, Victor V Flambaum^{3

4}, Konrad W Lehnert^{1

2}, Jun Ye^{1

2}, Eric A Cornell^{1

2}

Affiliations

¹ JILA, NIST and University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado 80309, USA.
² Department of Physics, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado 80309, USA.
³ School of Physics, University of New South Wales, Sydney 2052, Australia.
⁴ Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, 55128 Mainz, Germany.

PMID: 33988453
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.126.171301

Abstract

We use our recent electric dipole moment (EDM) measurement data to constrain the possibility that the HfF^{+} EDM oscillates in time due to interactions with candidate dark matter axionlike particles (ALPs). We employ a Bayesian analysis method which accounts for both the look-elsewhere effect and the uncertainties associated with stochastic density fluctuations in the ALP field. We find no evidence of an oscillating EDM over a range spanning from 27 nHz to 400 mHz, and we use this result to constrain the ALP-gluon coupling over the mass range 10^{-22}-10^{-15} eV. This is the first laboratory constraint on the ALP-gluon coupling in the 10^{-17}-10^{-15} eV range, and the first laboratory constraint to properly account for the stochastic nature of the ALP field.