Search for Axionlike Dark Matter Using Solid-State Nuclear Magnetic Resonance

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Search for Axionlike Dark Matter Using Solid-State Nuclear Magnetic Resonance

Deniz Aybas, Janos Adam, Emmy Blumenthal, Alexander V. Gramolin, Dorian Johnson, Annalies Kleyheeg, Samer Afach, John W. Blanchard, Gary P. Centers, Antoine Garcon, Martin Engler, Nataniel L. Figueroa, Marina Gil Sendra, Arne Wickenbrock, Matthew Lawson, Tao Wang, Teng Wu, Haosu Luo, Hamdi Mani, Philip Mauskopf, Peter W. Graham, Surjeet Rajendran, Derek F. Jackson Kimball, Dmitry Budker, and Alexander O. Sushkov

Phys. Rev. Lett. 126, 141802 – Published 9 April 2021

Abstract

We report the results of an experimental search for ultralight axionlike dark matter in the mass range 162–166 neV. The detection scheme of our Cosmic Axion Spin Precession Experiment is based on a precision measurement of ${}^{207}{Pb}$ solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance in a polarized ferroelectric crystal. Axionlike dark matter can exert an oscillating torque on ${}^{207}{Pb}$ nuclear spins via the electric dipole moment coupling $g_{d}$ or via the gradient coupling $g_{a N N}$ . We calibrate the detector and characterize the excitation spectrum and relaxation parameters of the nuclear spin ensemble with pulsed magnetic resonance measurements in a 4.4 T magnetic field. We sweep the magnetic field near this value and search for axionlike dark matter with Compton frequency within a 1 MHz band centered at 39.65 MHz. Our measurements place the upper bounds $| g_{d} | < 9.5 \times 10^{- 4} {GeV}^{- 2}$ and $| g_{a N N} | < 2.8 \times 10^{- 1} {GeV}^{- 1}$ (95% confidence level) in this frequency range. The constraint on $g_{d}$ corresponds to an upper bound of $1.0 \times 10^{- 21} e cm$ on the amplitude of oscillations of the neutron electric dipole moment and $4.3 \times 10^{- 6}$ on the amplitude of oscillations of $C P$ -violating $θ$ parameter of quantum chromodynamics. Our results demonstrate the feasibility of using solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance to search for axionlike dark matter in the neV mass range.

Received 29 December 2020
Revised 13 January 2021
Accepted 9 March 2021

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.126.141802

Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP³.

Published by the American Physical Society

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Particle dark matter

Axions Ferroelectrics Relaxor ferroelectrics

Dark matter detectors Nuclear magnetic resonance Precision measurements

Particles & FieldsCondensed Matter, Materials & Applied Physics

Authors & Affiliations

Deniz Aybas ^1,2, Janos Adam¹, Emmy Blumenthal¹, Alexander V. Gramolin¹, Dorian Johnson¹, Annalies Kleyheeg¹, Samer Afach^3,4, John W. Blanchard³, Gary P. Centers^3,4, Antoine Garcon^3,4, Martin Engler^3,4, Nataniel L. Figueroa^3,4, Marina Gil Sendra^3,4, Arne Wickenbrock^3,4, Matthew Lawson^5,6, Tao Wang⁷, Teng Wu⁸, Haosu Luo⁹, Hamdi Mani¹⁰, Philip Mauskopf¹⁰, Peter W. Graham¹¹, Surjeet Rajendran¹², Derek F. Jackson Kimball¹³, Dmitry Budker^3,4,14, and Alexander O. Sushkov ^1,2,15,*

¹Department of Physics, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts 02215, USA
²Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts 02215, USA
³Helmholtz-Institut, GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung, 55128 Mainz, Germany
⁴Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, 55128 Mainz, Germany
⁵The Oskar Klein Centre for Cosmoparticle Physics, Department of Physics, Stockholm University, AlbaNova, 10691 Stockholm, Sweden
⁶Nordita, KTH Royal Institute of Technology and Stockholm University, Roslagstullsbacken 23, 10691 Stockholm, Sweden
⁷Department of Physics, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey 08544, USA
⁸State Key Laboratory of Advanced Optical Communication Systems and Networks, Department of Electronics, and Center for Quantum Information Technology, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China
⁹Shanghai Institute of Ceramics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai 201800, China
¹⁰School of Earth and Space Exploration, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona 85287, USA
¹¹Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305, USA
¹²Department of Physics and Astronomy, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland 21218, USA
¹³Department of Physics, California State University–East Bay, Hayward, California 94542-3084, USA
¹⁴Department of Physics, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720-7300, USA
¹⁵Photonics Center, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts 02215, USA

^*asu@bu.edu

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Vol. 126, Iss. 14 — 9 April 2021

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Figure 1
Experimental setup. (a) The sample was a cylindrical ferroelectric PMN-PT crystal with diameter 0.46 cm and thickness 0.50 cm. It was electrically polarized along the cylinder axis, indicated with the black arrow. The pickup coil and the cancellation coil were coaxial with the crystal, and the axis of the Helmholtz excitation coil was orthogonal. The vertical leading magnetic field $B_{0}$ set the direction of the equilibrium spin polarization. Coils were supported by G-10 fiberglass cylinders shown in gray and pink. (b) Electrical schematic, showing the excitation and pickup circuits. Excitation pulses generated with the digital-to-analog converter (DAC) were amplified ( $A_{e}$ ) and coupled to the excitation coil via a tuned tank circuit that included matching and tuning capacitors, as well as a resistor to set the circuit quality factor. The pickup probe was also designed as a tuned tank circuit, coupling the voltage induced in the pickup coil to a low-noise cryogenic amplifier ( $A_{1}$ ), whose output was filtered, further amplified, and digitized with an analog-to-digital converter (ADC). (c) Pulsed NMR sequence used for FID measurements. The spin-ensemble equilibrium magnetization, initially parallel to $B_{0}$ , was tilted into the transverse plane by the excitation pulse. The FID signal was recorded after the excitation pulse, as the magnetization precessed and its transverse component decayed.
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Figure 2
Sensitivity calibration. (a) Measurements of ${}^{207}{Pb}$ FID following a spin excitation pulse of length $t_{p} = 20 ms$ . The excitation carrier frequency was set to 39.71 MHz, and the Rabi frequency was $Ω_{e} = 0.88 rad / ms$ . The data points show the in-phase (blue circles) and the out-of-phase (orange squares) quadratures of the Fourier transform of the detected voltage, referred to the input of the pickup probe amplifier $A_{1}$ . Data points were binned and averaged, the error bars show one standard deviation for each bin. The lines show the best-fit simulation of the spin response, with the light-colored narrow bands indicating the range of simulation results if parameters are varied by one standard deviation away from their best-fit values. We performed the fitting simultaneously to three FID datasets, with excitation-pulse lengths $t_{p} = 0.2, 2, 20 ms$ , with free parameters including the spin coherence time $T_{2}$ and pickup-circuit transfer coefficient $α$ (see Supplemental Material [53]). (b) Measurement of the normalized ${}^{207}{Pb}$ NMR excitation spectrum near Larmor frequency 39.71 MHz. Excitation pulses of length 1.6 ms and Rabi frequency $Ω_{e} = 0.88 rad / ms$ were delivered at the carrier frequencies shown on the $x$ axis. Data points show the amplitude of the spin FID response, normalized so that the integral of the spectrum is unity. The error bars indicate one standard deviation uncertainties of the FID spectrum fits. We model the excitation spectrum as a super-Gaussian of order 2 (red line) [53]. (c) Detector calibration for varying drive Rabi frequency. Data points show the amplitude of the spin FID response after an excitation pulse of length 20 ms, delivered at the carrier frequency 39.71 MHz, with Rabi frequency $Ω_{e}$ plotted on the $x$ axis. The error bars indicate one standard deviation uncertainties, obtained by grouping 100 consecutive FID measurements taken at each $Ω_{e}$ into five sets and independently analyzing each set [53]. The orange line shows the spin response simulated using the Bloch equations with parameters extracted from data in (a). (d) Measurement of ferroelectric hysteresis in the PMN-PT single crystal. The remanent polarization $P_{r}$ persists after the applied voltage has been ramped down to zero.
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Figure 3
Results of the search for spin interactions with axionlike dark matter. (a) The axionlike dark matter EDM coupling (left $y$ axis) and nucleon gradient coupling (right $y$ axis) limits in the mass range 162–166 neV shown with a blue line. The shaded region above the line is excluded at 95% confidence level. The green region is excluded by analysis of cooling of the supernova SN1987A; the color gradient indicates theoretical uncertainty [16]. Existing bounds at other masses, as well as CASPEr sensitivity projections, are shown in Fig. S9 of the Supplemental Material [53]. (b) The histogram of the optimally filtered power spectral density of transverse sample magnetization within the frequency window centered at 39.16 MHz. The red line shows the Gaussian distribution model, and the vertical black dashed line shows the $3.355 σ$ candidate threshold at $17 {fT}^{2}$ .
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