Searches for Light Scalar Dark Matter

Download or read book Searches for Light Scalar Dark Matter written by Ken Van Tilburg and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If the dark matter is made up of a bosonic particle, it can be ultralight, with a mass potentially much below 1 eV. Moduli fields, whose values could set couplings and masses of known particles, are good candidates for such light dark matter. Their abundance in our Universe would manifest itself as tiny fractional oscillations of Standard Model parameters, such as the electron mass or the fine-structure constant, in turn modulating length and time scales of atoms. Rods and clocks, used for gedanken experiments in the development of relativity theory, have since transformed into actual precision instruments. The size of acoustic resonators and the frequency of atomic transitions can now be measured to 1 part in 10^24 and 10^18, respectively, and thus constitute sensitive probes of moduli. Atomic gravitational wave detectors can have a time-domain response to modulus dark matter, and sense temporal oscillations of atomic frequencies down to 1 part in 10^25. This thesis gives an overview of the parameter space of modulus dark matter, and compares the sensitivity of various experimental proposals relative to existing constraints from searches for new forces. I will focus on two classes of experimental strategies in particular: resonant-mass detectors (rods), and atomic spectroscopy and interferometry (clocks).