Sensor community GNOME publishes complete information in Nature Physics for the primary time — 9 stations in six nations concerned.
A world crew of researchers with key participation from the PRISMA+ Cluster of Excellence at Johannes Gutenberg College Mainz (JGU) and the Helmholtz Institute Mainz (HIM) has revealed for the primary time complete information on the seek for darkish matter utilizing a worldwide community of optical magnetometers. In line with the scientists, darkish matter fields ought to produce a attribute sign sample that may be detected by correlated measurements at a number of stations of the GNOME community. Evaluation of information from a one-month steady GNOME operation has not but yielded a corresponding indication. Nonetheless, the measurement permits to formulate constraints on the traits of darkish matter, because the researchers report within the prestigious journal Nature Physics.
GNOME stands for World Community of Optical Magnetometers for Unique Physics Searches. Behind it are magnetometers distributed around the globe in Germany, Serbia, Poland, Israel, South Korea, China, Australia, and the USA. With GNOME, the researchers notably wish to advance the seek for darkish matter – one of the vital thrilling challenges of basic physics within the twenty first century. In spite of everything, it has lengthy been recognized that many puzzling astronomical observations, such because the rotation pace of stars in galaxies or the spectrum of the cosmic background radiation, can finest be defined by darkish matter.
Sketch of the worldwide GNOME community. Credit score: Hector Masia Roig
“Extraordinarily gentle bosonic particles are thought-about one of the vital promising candidates for darkish matter immediately. These embody so-called axion-like particles – ALPs for brief,” stated Professor Dr. Dmitry Budker, professor at PRISMA+ and at HIM, an institutional collaboration of Johannes Gutenberg College Mainz and the GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung in Darmstadt. “They will also be thought-about as a classical area oscillating with a sure frequency. A peculiarity of such bosonic fields is that – in keeping with a potential theoretical situation – they'll type patterns and buildings. Because of this, the density of darkish matter might be concentrated in many alternative areas – discrete area partitions smaller than a galaxy however a lot bigger than Earth may type, for instance.”
“If such a wall encounters the Earth, it's step by step detected by the GNOME community and might trigger transient attribute sign patterns within the magnetometers,” defined Dr. Arne Wickenbrock, one of many examine’s co-authors. “Much more, the alerts are correlated with one another in sure methods – relying on how briskly the wall is transferring and when it reaches every location.”
Mainz-based setup of the GNOME Community. Credit score: Hector Masia Roig
The community in the meantime consists of 14 magnetometers distributed over eight nations worldwide, 9 of them offered information for the present evaluation. The measurement precept is predicated on an interplay of darkish matter with the nuclear spins of the atoms within the magnetometer. The atoms are excited with a laser at a particular frequency, orienting the nuclear spins in a single path. A possible darkish matter area can disturb this path, which is measurable.
Figuratively talking, one can think about that the atoms within the magnetometer initially dance round in confusion, as clarified by Hector Masia-Roig, a doctoral pupil within the Budker group and in addition an writer of the present examine. “After they ‘hear’ the appropriate frequency of laser gentle, all of them spin collectively. Darkish matter particles can throw the dancing atoms out of steadiness. We are able to measure this perturbation very exactly.” Now the community of magnetometers turns into necessary: When the Earth strikes by way of a spatially restricted wall of darkish matter, the dancing atoms in all stations are step by step disturbed. One in every of these stations is positioned in a laboratory on the Helmholtz Institute in Mainz. “Solely once we match the alerts from all of the stations can we assess what triggered the disturbance,”stated Masia-Roig. “Utilized to the picture of the dancing atoms, this implies: If we evaluate the measurement outcomes from all of the stations, we will determine whether or not it was only one courageous dancer dancing out of line or really a world darkish matter disturbance.”
Within the present examine, the analysis crew analyzes information from a one-month steady operation of GNOME. The consequence: Statistically vital alerts didn't seem within the investigated mass vary from one femtoelectronvolt (feV) to 100,000 feV. Conversely, which means the researchers can slim down the vary during which such alerts may theoretically be discovered even additional than earlier than. For eventualities that depend on discrete darkish matter partitions, this is a crucial consequence – “although we now have not but been capable of detect such a site wall with our world ring search,” added Joseph Smiga, one other PhD pupil in Mainz and writer of the examine.
Future work of the GNOME collaboration will deal with bettering each the magnetometers themselves and the info evaluation. Specifically, steady operation must be much more steady. That is necessary to reliably seek for alerts that last more than an hour. As well as, the earlier alkali atoms within the magnetometers are to get replaced by noble gases. Below the title Superior GNOME, the researchers count on this to end in significantly higher sensitivity for future measurements within the seek for ALPs and darkish matter.
Reference: “Seek for topological defect darkish matter with a world community of optical magnetometers” by Samer Afach, Ben C. Buchler, Dmitry Budker, Conner Dailey, Andrei Derevianko, Vincent Dumont, Nataniel L. Figueroa, Ilja Gerhardt, Zoran D. Grujic, Hong Guo, Chuanpeng Hao, Paul S. Hamilton, Morgan Hedges, Derek F. Jackson Kimball, Dongok Kim, Sami Khamis, Thomas Kornack, Victor Lebedev, Zheng-Tian Lu, Hector Masia-Roig, Madeline Monroy, Mikhail Padniuk, Christopher A. Palm, Solar Yool Park, Karun V. Paul, Alexander Penaflor, Xiang Peng, Maxim Pospelov, Rayshaun Preston, Szymon Pustelny, Theo Scholtes, Perrin C. Segura, Yannis Ok. Semertzidis, Dong Sheng, Yun Chang Shin, Joseph A. Smiga, Jason E. Stalnaker, Ibrahim Sulai, Dhruv Tandon, Tao Wang, Antoine Weis, Arne Wickenbrock, Tatum Wilson, Teng Wu, David Wurm, Wei Xiao, Yucheng Yang, Dongrui Yu and Jianwei Zhang, 7 December 2021, Nature Physics.
DOI: 10.1038/s41567-021-01393-y
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