Abstract
We propose a new class of bosonic dark matter (DM) detectors based on resonant absorption onto a gas of small polyatomic molecules. Bosonic DM acts on the molecules as a narrow-band perturbation, like an intense but weakly coupled laser. The excited molecules emit the absorbed energy into fluorescence photons that are picked up by sensitive photodetectors with low dark count rates. This setup is sensitive to any DM candidate that couples to electrons, photons, and nuclei, and may improve on current searches by several orders of magnitude in coupling for DM masses between 0.2 eV and 20 eV. This type of detector has excellent intrinsic energy resolution, along with several control variables---pressure, temperature, external electromagnetic fields, molecular species/isotopes---that allow for powerful background rejection methods as well as precision studies of a potential DM signal. The proposed experiment does not require usage of novel exotic materials or futuristic technologies, relying instead on the well-established field of molecular spectroscopy, and on recent advances in single-photon detection. Cooperative radiation effects, which arise due to the large spatial coherence of the nonrelativistic DM field in certain detector geometries, can tightly focus the DM-induced fluorescence photons in a direction that depends on the DM's velocity, possibly permitting a detailed reconstruction of the full 3D velocity distribution in our Galactic neighborhood, as well as further background rejection.
Highlights
Dark matter (DM), a form of nonrelativistic matter that amounts to 25% of the energy budget of the Universe but does not appear to emit light, is the conservative option to explain a wealth of astrophysical and cosmological data that cannot otherwise be accommodated for with the known interactions and particles in the Standard Model (SM)
II, we review the dynamics of a two-level system under the influence of a nonrelativistic wave and the types of molecular states and transitions that can be excited by bosonic DM
We focus on these two cases because of pedagogy and because they embody simple extensions of the Standard Model that are theoretically consistent up to very high energy scales
Summary
Dark matter (DM), a form of nonrelativistic matter that amounts to 25% of the energy budget of the Universe but does not appear to emit light, is the conservative option to explain a wealth of astrophysical and cosmological data that cannot otherwise be accommodated for with the known interactions and particles in the Standard Model (SM). While there are many possible answers to the first two questions, the number of dark matter candidates dwindles once you focus on the ones with a realistic production mechanism One such great DM candidate is the so-called weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP), a type of particle that may be produced with the correct relic abundance in the early Universe through the thermal freeze-out mechanism, provided it has a mass and interaction strength close to the electroweak scale. When bosons lighter than 15 eV make up a significant fraction of the local DM energy density, their number density is so large that there are many of them per de Broglie wavelength volume When that happens, their superposition can be described as a classical field oscillating at a frequency set by the mass and a coherence time determined by the inverse energy spread, roughly 106 periods of oscillation. We show that the calculations performed in the semiclassical approximation throughout this work give—on average— the correct results
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