TL;DR
This study searches for ultralight dark-photon dark matter using decades of geomagnetic data from SuperMAG stations, setting new bounds on the kinetic mixing parameter and finding no significant signals.
Contribution
It introduces a novel search method using global vector spherical harmonics and Bayesian analysis on unshielded geomagnetic data for dark-photon detection.
Findings
Set new exclusion bounds on dark-photon kinetic mixing parameter.
No robust evidence found for dark-photon signals in the dataset.
Candidate signals were identified but failed robustness checks.
Abstract
In our recent companion paper [arXiv:2106.00022], we pointed out a novel signature of ultralight kinetically mixed dark-photon dark matter. This signature is a quasi-monochromatic, time-oscillating terrestrial magnetic field that takes a particular pattern over the surface of the Earth. In this work, we present a search for this signal in existing, unshielded magnetometer data recorded by geographically dispersed, geomagnetic stations. The dataset comes from the SuperMAG Collaboration and consists of measurements taken with one-minute cadence since 1970, with stations contributing in all. We aggregate the magnetic field measurements from all stations by projecting them onto a small set of global vector spherical harmonics (VSH) that capture the expected vectorial pattern of the signal at each station. Within each dark-photon coherence time, we use a data-driven…
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