An international team of researchers with key participation from the PRISMA+ Cluster of Excellence at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) and the Helmholtz Institute Mainz (HIM) has published for the first time comprehensive data on the search for dark matter using a worldwide network of optical magnetometers.
According to the scientists, dark matter fields should produce a characteristic signal pattern that can be detected by correlated measurements at multiple stations of the GNOME network.
However, the measurement allows to formulate constraints on the characteristics of dark matter, as the researchers report in the journal Nature Physics.
GNOME stands for Global Network of Optical Magnetometers for Exotic Physics Searches.
With GNOME, the researchers particularly want to advance the search for dark matter — one of the most exciting challenges of fundamental physics in the 21st century.
“Extremely light bosonic particles are considered one of the most promising candidates for dark matter today.
Dark matter particles can throw the dancing atoms out of balance.
We can measure this perturbation very precisely.” Now the network of magnetometers becomes important: When the Earth moves through a spatially limited wall of dark matter, the dancing atoms in all stations are gradually disturbed.
“Applied to the image of the dancing atoms, this means: If we compare the measurement results from all the stations, we can decide whether it was just one brave dancer dancing out of line or actually a global dark matter disturbance.”.
For scenarios that rely on discrete dark matter walls, this is an important result — “even though we have not yet been able to detect such a domain wall with our global ring search,” added Joseph Smiga, another PhD student in Mainz and author of the study.
Under the title Advanced GNOME, the researchers expect this to result in considerably better sensitivity for future measurements in the search for ALPs and dark matter
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