Prospective Sensitivities of Atom Interferometers to Gravitational Waves and Ultralight Dark Matter

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the potential of atom interferometers, both terrestrial and space-based, to detect gravitational waves from various cosmic sources and ultralight dark matter, comparing their sensitivities with existing detectors.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive survey of prospective sensitivities of atom interferometers to gravitational waves and ultralight dark matter, including background noise analysis and comparison with current detectors.

Findings

Atom interferometers can potentially detect gravitational waves from diverse cosmic events.

Sensitivity comparisons show atom interferometers complement existing detectors like LIGO and LISA.

Proposed space missions AEDGE and terrestrial AION have promising capabilities for dark matter detection.

Abstract

We survey the prospective sensitivities of terrestrial and space-borne atom interferometers (AIs) to gravitational waves (GWs) generated by cosmological and astrophysical sources, and to ultralight dark matter. We discuss the backgrounds from gravitational gradient noise (GGN) in terrestrial detectors, and also binary pulsar and asteroid backgrounds in space-borne detectors. We compare the sensitivities of LIGO and LISA with those of the 100m and 1km stages of the AION terrestrial AI project, as well as two options for the proposed AEDGE AI space mission with cold atom clouds either inside or outside the spacecraft, considering as possible sources the mergers of black holes and neutron stars, supernovae, phase transitions in the early Universe, cosmic strings and quantum fluctuations in the early Universe that could have generated primordial black holes. We also review the capabilities of AION and AEDGE for detecting coherent waves of ultralight scalar dark matter.