Gao Christina, Halperin William, Kahn Yonatan, Nguyen Man, Schütte-Engel Jan, Scott John William
Department of Physics, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois 61801, USA.
Illinois Center for Advanced Studies of the Universe, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois 61801, USA.
Phys Rev Lett. 2022 Nov 18;129(21):211801. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.129.211801.
Axions and axionlike particles may couple to nuclear spins like a weak oscillating effective magnetic field, the "axion wind." Existing proposals for detecting the axion wind sourced by dark matter exploit analogies to nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and aim to detect the small transverse field generated when the axion wind resonantly tips the precessing spins in a polarized sample of material. We describe a new proposal using the homogeneous precession domain of superfluid ^{3}He as the detection medium, where the effect of the axion wind is a small shift in the precession frequency of a large-amplitude NMR signal. We argue that this setup can provide broadband detection of multiple axion masses simultaneously and has competitive sensitivity to other axion wind experiments such as CASPEr-Wind at masses below 10^{-7} eV by exploiting precision frequency metrology in the readout stage.
轴子和类轴子粒子可能会像一个微弱振荡的有效磁场(即“轴子风”)那样与核自旋耦合。现有的探测由暗物质产生的轴子风的提议利用了与核磁共振(NMR)的类比,并旨在探测当轴子风使极化材料样本中进动的自旋发生共振倾斜时产生的小横向场。我们描述了一种新提议,即使用超流³He的均匀进动域作为探测介质,其中轴子风的效应是大幅核磁共振信号进动频率的微小偏移。我们认为,通过在读取阶段利用精密频率计量技术,这种设置可以同时对多个轴子质量进行宽带探测,并且对于质量低于10⁻⁷ eV的情况,与其他轴子风实验(如CASPEr-Wind)相比具有竞争力的灵敏度。