No Arabic abstract
The axion is a light pseudoscalar particle which suppresses CP-violating effects in strong interactions and also happens to be an excellent dark matter candidate. Axions constituting the dark matter halo of our galaxy may be detected by their resonant conversion to photons in a microwave cavity permeated by a magnetic field. The current generation of the microwave cavity experiment has demonstrated sensitivity to plausible axion models, and upgrades in progress should achieve the sensitivity required for a definitive search, at least for low mass axions. However, a comprehensive strategy for scanning the entire mass range, from 1-1000 $mu$eV, will require significant technological advances to maintain the needed sensitivity at higher frequencies. Such advances could include sub-quantum-limited amplifiers based on squeezed vacuum states, bolometers, and/or superconducting microwave cavities. The Axion Dark Matter eXperiment at High Frequencies (ADMX-HF) represents both a pathfinder for first data in the 20-100 $mu$eV range ($sim$5-25 GHz), and an innovation test-bed for these concepts.
Axions in the micro eV mass range are a plausible cold dark matter candidate and may be detected by their conversion into microwave photons in a resonant cavity immersed in a static magnetic field. The first result from such an axion search using a superconducting first-stage amplifier (SQUID) is reported. The SQUID amplifier, replacing a conventional GaAs field-effect transistor amplifier, successfully reached axion-photon coupling sensitivity in the band set by present axion models and sets the stage for a definitive axion search utilizing near quantum-limited SQUID amplifiers.
We demonstrate a superconducting (SC) microwave (mw) cavity that can accelerate the dark matter search by maintaining superconductivity in a high DC magnetic field. We used high-temperature superconductor (HTSC) yttrium barium copper oxide (YBCO) with a phase transition temperature of 90K to prevent SC failure by the magnetic field. Since the direct deposition of HTSC film on the metallic mw cavity is very difficult, we used the commercial HTSC tapes which are flexible metallic tapes coated with HTSC thin films. We fabricated resonating cavity ($f_{TM010}$ ~ 6.89 GHz) with a third of the inner wall covered by YBCO tapes and measured the quality factor (Q factor) at 4K temperature, varying the DC magnetic field from 0 to 8 tesla. There was no significant quality (Q) factor drop and the superconductivity was well maintained even in 8 tesla magnetic field. This implies the possibility of good performance of HTSC mw resonant cavity under a strong magnetic field for axion detection.
A high-quality factor microwave resonator in the presence of a strong magnetic field could have a wide range of applications, such as axion dark matter searches where the two aspects must coexist to enhance the experimental sensitivity. We introduce a polygon-shaped cavity design with bi-axially textured YBa$_{2}$Cu$_{3}$O$_{7-x}$ superconducting tapes covering the entire inner wall. Using a 12-sided polygon cavity, we obtain substantially improved quality factors of the TM$_{010}$ mode at 6.9 GHz at 4 K with respect to a copper cavity and observe no considerable degradation in the presence of magnetic fields up to 8 T. This corresponds to the first demonstration of practical applications of superconducting radio frequency technology for axion and other research areas requiring low loss in a strong magnetic field. We address the importance of the successful demonstration and discuss further improvements.
In dark matter axion searches, quantum uncertainty manifests as a fundamental noise source, limiting the measurement of the quadrature observables used for detection. We use vacuum squeezing to circumvent the quantum limit in a search for a new particle. By preparing a microwave-frequency electromagnetic field in a squeezed state and near-noiselessly reading out only the squeezed quadrature, we double the search rate for axions over a mass range favored by recent theoretical projections. We observe no signature of dark matter axions in the combined $16.96-17.12$ and $17.14-17.28spacemutext{eV}/c^2$ mass window for axion-photon couplings above $g_{gamma} = 1.38times g_{gamma}^text{KSVZ}$, reporting exclusion at the 90% level.
We are building an experiment to search for dark matter in the form of dark photons in the nano- to milli-eV mass range. This experiment is the electromagnetic dual of magnetic detector dark radio experiments. It is also a frequency-time dual experiment in two ways: We search for a high-Q signal in wide-band data rather than tuning a high-$Q$ resonator, and we measure electric rather than magnetic fields. In this paper we describe a pilot experiment using room temperature electronics which demonstrates feasibility and sets useful limits to the kinetic coupling $epsilon sim 10^{-12}$ over 50--300 MHz. With a factor of 2000 increase in real-time spectral coverage, and lower system noise temperature, it will soon be possible to search a wide range of masses at 100 times this sensitivity. We describe the planned experiment in two phases: Phase-I will implement a wide band, 5-million channel, real-time FFT processor over the 30--300 MHz range with a back-end time-domain optimal filter to search for the predicted $Qsim 10^6$ line using low-noise amplifiers. We have completed spot frequency calibrations using a biconical dipole antenna in a shielded room that extrapolate to a $5 sigma$ limit of $epsilonsim 10^{-13}$ for the coupling from the dark field, per month of integration. Phase-II will extend the search to 20 GHz using cryogenic preamplifiers and new antennas.