Towards an electrostatic storage ring for fundamental physics measurements

TL;DR

This paper proposes a novel electrostatic storage ring capable of ultra-sensitive magnetic field measurements and dark matter detection, enabling new fundamental physics experiments with polarized ions and long storage times.

Contribution

It introduces a new table-top electrostatic storage ring design for polarized ions, enhancing sensitivity for fundamental physics measurements including EDMs and dark matter searches.

Findings

Potential to measure magnetic fields at 10^{-21} T resolution

Ability to store and probe various ions and molecules

Sensitivity to dark matter in the 10^{-10} to 10^{-19} eV mass range

Abstract

We describe a new table-top electrostatic storage ring concept for $30$ keV polarized ions at frozen spin condition. The device will ultimately be capable of measuring magnetic fields with a resolution of 10$^{-21}$ T with sub-mHz bandwidth. With the possibility to store different kinds of ions or ionic molecules and access to prepare and probe states of the systems using lasers and SQUIDs, it can be used to search for electric dipole moments (EDMs) of electrons and nucleons, as well as axion-like particle dark matter and dark photon dark matter. Its sensitivity potential stems from several hours of storage time, comparably long spin coherence times, and the possibility to trap up to 10$^9$ particles in bunches with possibly different state preparations for differential measurements. As a dark matter experiment, it is most sensitive in the mass range of 10$^{-10}$ to 10$^{-19}$ eV, where it can potentially probe couplings orders of magnitude below current and proposed laboratory experiments.