Journal
PHYSICAL REVIEW D
Volume 97, Issue 7, Pages -Publisher
AMER PHYSICAL SOC
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.97.075020
Keywords
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Funding
- NSERC
- Stavros Niarchos Foundation
- Government of Canada through Industry Canada
- Province of Ontario through the Ministry of Economic Development and Innovation
- NSF [PHY-1316706, PHY-417295, PHY-1507160, PHY-1316753, PHY-1620727]
- DOE Early Career Award [DE-SC0012012]
- W.M. Keck Foundation
- Simons Foundation [378243]
- Heising-Simons Foundation [2015-037, 2015-038]
- Schmidt Fellowship - generosity of Eric and Wendy Schmidt
- AMIAS
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We show that gravitational wave detectors based on a type of atom interferometry are sensitive to ultralight scalar dark matter. Such dark matter can cause temporal oscillations in fundamental constants with a frequency set by the dark matter mass and amplitude determined by the local dark matter density. The result is a modulation of atomic transition energies. We point out a new time-domain signature of this effect in a type of gravitational wave detector that compares two spatially separated atom interferometers referenced by a common laser. Such a detector can improve on current searches for electron-mass or electric-charge modulus dark matter by up to 10 orders of magnitude in coupling, in a frequency band complementary to that of other proposals. It demonstrates that this class of atomic sensors is qualitatively different from other gravitational wave detectors, including those based on laser interferometry. By using atomic-clock-like interferometers, laser noise is mitigated with only a single baseline. These atomic sensors can thus detect scalar signals in addition to tensor signals.
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