Ultralight dark matter detection with levitated ferromagnets

Abstract

Levitated ferromagnets act as ultraprecise magnetometers, which can exhibit high quality factors due to their excellent isolation from the environment. These instruments can be utilized in searches for ultralight dark matter candidates, such as axionlike dark matter or dark-photon dark matter. In addition to being sensitive to an axion-photon coupling or kinetic mixing, which produce physical magnetic fields, ferromagnets are also sensitive to the effective magnetic field (or "axion wind") produced by an axion-electron coupling. While the dynamics of a levitated ferromagnet in response to a DC magnetic field have been well studied, all of these couplings would produce AC fields. In this work, we study the response of a ferromagnet to an applied AC magnetic field and use these results to project their sensitivity to axion and dark-photon dark matter. We pay special attention to the direction of motion induced by an applied AC field, in particular, whether it precesses around the applied field (similar to an electron spin) or librates in the plane of the field (similar to a compass needle). We show that existing levitated ferromagnet setups can already have comparable sensitivity to an axion-electron coupling as comagnetometer or torsion balance experiments. In addition, future setups can become sensitive probes of axion-electron coupling, dark-photon kinetic mixing, and axion-photon coupling, for ultralight dark matter masses $m_{\mathrm{DM}}\lesssim \mathrm{feV}$.

21 pages, 6 figures. Published version

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Cited by in corpus (7)

• First Search for Ultralight Dark Matter Using a Magnetically Levitated Particle
• Microscopic theory of a precessing ferromagnet for ultrasensitive magnetometry
• Search for Dark Matter Scattering from Optically Levitated Nanoparticles
• Gyroscopically stabilized quantum spin rotors
• Ultralight dark matter detection with trapped-ion interferometry
• Levitated Milligram-scale Ferromagnetic Magnetometer at Room Temperature
• Emerging axion detection in artificial magnetoelectric materials