Searching for Axion Dark Matter via Superconductor-Spin Hybrid Magnetometers

Abstract:Axions are a compelling dark matter candidate suggested by theories beyond the Standard Model. The predicted axion-electron coupling and the resulting pseudomagnetic field allow for laboratory axion searches. Here we report an experimental axion search via a superconductor-spin hybrid magnetometer. A state-of-the-art broadband magnetometer with a sensitivity of sub-100 aT/Hz$^{1/2}$ at tens of kHz has been realized by coupling a ferrite spin sensor to a readout system based on a superconducting quantum interference device. The most stringent terrestrial constraints on the axion-electron coupling have been established in the frequency range 5$\sim$60 kHz. In the future, an improvement on the constraints of more than 4 orders of magnitude is foreseeable through arrays of superconductor-spin hybrid magnetometers with optimized designs. This work demonstrates the potential of superconductor-spin hybrid magnetometers in high-precision magnetic field sensing and the study of fundamental physics.

Instrumentation and Detectors (physics.ins-det); Quantum Physics (quant-ph)

arXiv:2610.27764 [physics.ins-det]

(or arXiv:2610.27764v1 [physics.ins-det] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.27764 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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