Axion wind detection with the homogeneous precession domain of superfluid helium-3

Abstract

Axions and axion-like 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 (HPD) of superfluid helium-3 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.

v2: typos fixed and references added. v1: 5+1 pages, 3 figures

References in corpus (7)

• Search for axionlike dark matter with a liquid-state nuclear spin comagnetometer
• Search for axion-like dark matter using solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance
• Bose-Einstein condensation of magnons in superfluid 3He
• NASDUCK: New Constraints on Axion-like Dark Matter from Floquet Quantum Detector
• Source mass characterization in the ARIADNE axion experiment
• Laboratory Constraints on the Neutron-Spin Coupling of feV-scale Axions
• Axion Dark Matter

Cited by in corpus (12)

• On the Sensitivity of Spin-Precession Axion Experiments
• From Supernovae to Neutron Stars: A Systematic Approach to Axion Production at Finite Density
• Physical Signatures of Fermion-Coupled Axion Dark Matter
• Magnon Bose-Einstein condensates: from time crystals and quantum chromodynamics to vortex sensing and cosmology
• HeLIOS: The Superfluid Helium Ultralight Dark Matter Detector
• Nuclear Spin Metrology with Nitrogen Vacancy Center in Diamond for Axion Dark Matter Detection
• New Technologies for Axion and Dark Photon Searches
• Annual-modulation fingerprint of the axion wind induced sideband triplet in quantum dot spin qubit sensors
• The statistics and sensitivity of axion wind detection with the homogeneous precession domain of superfluid helium-3
• Axion detection via superfluid ${}^3$He ferromagnetic phase and quantum measurement techniques
• Time crystal optomechanics
• Multimessenger Astronomy Beyond the Standard Model: New Window from Quantum Sensors