A Nuclear Interferometer for Ultra-Light Dark Matter Detection

TL;DR

This paper introduces a nuclear interferometer using thorium-229 nuclear transitions as a novel method to detect ultra-light dark matter, leveraging enhanced sensitivity to fundamental constant variations.

Contribution

It proposes a new nuclear interferometry technique employing thorium-229 for ultra-light dark matter detection, expanding the experimental approaches beyond existing atomic clock interferometers.

Findings

Potential to complement existing dark matter searches.

Enhanced sensitivity to scalar couplings to photons.

Ability to probe new physics in the QCD sector.

Abstract

We propose the nuclear interferometer - a single-photon interferometry experiment based upon the thorium-229 nuclear clock transition - as a novel detector for ultra-light dark matter. Thanks to the enhanced sensitivity of this transition to the variation of fundamental constants, we find that possible realisations of such an experiment deploying either single ions or clouds of atoms have the potential to complement advanced very-long-baseline terrestrial clock atom interferometers in the search for ultra-light dark matter with scalar couplings to photons in the future. Nuclear interferometry may also offer an unparalleled window to new physics coupling to the QCD sector via quarks or gluons, with a discovery reach that could enhance existing and proposed experiments over a range of frequencies in the direction of well-motivated parameter space.