New Constraints on Dark Photon Dark Matter with Superconducting Nanowire Detectors in an Optical Haloscope

Published

June 10, 2022

Author(s)

Jeff Chiles, Ilya Charaev, Asimina Arvanitaki, Masha Baryakhtar, junwu huang, Robert Lasenby, Ken Van Tillburg, Alexana Roshko, George Burton, Marco Colangelo, Sae Woo Nam, Karl Berggren

Abstract

Uncovering the nature of dark matter is one of the most important goals of particle physics. Light bosonic particles, such as the dark photon, are well-motivated candidates: they are generically long-lived, weakly-interacting, and naturally produced in the early universe. In this work, we report on a proof-of-concept search for dark photon dark matter in the eV mass range, via coherent absorption in a multi-layer dielectric haloscope. Using a Superconducting Nanowire Single-Photon Detector (SNSPD), we achieve efficient photon detection with very low 10^-6 Hz) dark count rates. The observed count rate in our detector differed insignificantly from a reference SNSPD, enabling our prototype experiment to set new limits the dark photon dark matter kinetic mixing parameter 10^-12 over a mass range of 0.7 - 0.8 eV (photon wavelength 1550-1770 nm). This performance demonstrates that, with feasible upgrades, our architecture could probe significant new parameter space for dark photon and axion dark matter in the meV to 10 eV mass range.

Citation

Physical Review Letters

Pub Type

Journals

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Keywords

dark matter, snspd, snspds, dark photon

Citation

Chiles, J. , Charaev, I. , Arvanitaki, A. , Baryakhtar, M. , huang, J. , Lasenby, R. , Van Tillburg, K. , Roshko, A. , Burton, G. , Colangelo, M. , Nam, S. and Berggren, K. (2022), New Constraints on Dark Photon Dark Matter with Superconducting Nanowire Detectors in an Optical Haloscope, Physical Review Letters, [online], https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=933249 (Accessed January 14, 2025)