Enhanced effects of variation of the fundamental constants in laser interferometers and application to dark matter detection

TL;DR

This paper proposes a novel laser interferometer setup using a strontium optical lattice clock and silicon cavity to detect variations in fundamental constants, with potential applications in dark matter detection.

Contribution

It introduces a new small-scale interferometer platform with enhanced sensitivity for measuring variations in fundamental constants and dark matter detection.

Findings

Enhanced sensitivity due to multiple light passages (up to 10^5) in the proposed interferometer.

Potential to detect scalar dark matter as an oscillating field or topological defects.

Applicability to existing large-scale gravitational-wave detectors like LIGO and Virgo.

Abstract

We outline new laser interferometer measurements to search for variation of the electromagnetic fine-structure constant $\alpha$ and particle masses (including a non-zero photon mass). We propose a strontium optical lattice clock -- silicon single-crystal cavity interferometer as a novel small-scale platform for these new measurements. Multiple passages of a light beam inside an interferometer enhance the effects due to variation of the fundamental constants by the mean number of passages ($N_{\textrm{eff}} \sim 10^2$ for a large-scale gravitational-wave detector, such as LIGO, Virgo, GEO600 or TAMA300, while $N_{\textrm{eff}} \sim 10^5$ for a strontium clock -- silicon cavity interferometer). Our proposed laser interferometer measurements may be implemented as an extremely precise tool in the direct detection of scalar dark matter that forms an oscillating classical field or topological defects.