Gravitational Wave Detection With Plasma Haloscopes

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the potential of plasma haloscopes, like ALPHA, for high-frequency gravitational wave detection, revealing current limitations and proposing modifications to enhance sensitivity in the GHz range.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of gravitational wave detection capabilities of plasma haloscopes and suggests simple modifications to improve their sensitivity.

Findings

Baseline ALPHA design is less sensitive than previously estimated.

Simple modifications can significantly improve detection sensitivity.

Potential to detect gravitational waves in the 10-50 GHz frequency range.

Abstract

Searches for high frequency gravitational waves using cavities based on the Gertsenshtein effect were recently proposed, building off existing axion dark matter experiments. In particular, the sensitivity of axion dark matter experiments using metamaterial plasmas (tunable plasma haloscopes) to gravitational waves has not been explored in detail. Here we perform a full analysis of gravitational wave detection in plasma haloscopes, showing that the baseline design of experiments such as ALPHA is several orders of magnitude less sensitive than previously thought. We show how simple changes to the experiment can recover that sensitivity and lead to a powerful gravitational wave detector in the order of $(10-50)$ GHz frequency range.