Axion-mediated photon-to-photon transitions in high finesse dielectric resonators

TL;DR

This paper explores how high-quality dielectric resonators can enhance axion-photon interactions, proposing a new experimental approach to detect axions by observing resonant photon-to-photon transitions in the microwave spectrum.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method using high-Q dielectric resonators to amplify axion-photon interactions and predicts feasible experimental setups for axion detection.

Findings

Analytical calculations show resonant conditions for axion-mediated transitions.

Identification of axion mass regimes accessible with standard dielectric resonators.

Proposal of the DARK-ROSE experiment for axion detection.

Abstract

Axions are hypothetical particles that could address both the strong charge-parity problem in quantum chromodynamics and the enigmatic nature of dark matter. However, if axions exist, their mass remains unknown, and they are expected to interact very weakly with the electromagnetic field, which explains why they have not been detected yet. This study proposes a way to substantially augment the axion-photon interaction by confining the photons within high-quality-factor dielectric resonators, increasing their intensity and lifetime, and thus the possibility of interacting with axions in the background. In view of this, we study resonant axion-mediated photonic transitions in millimeter-sized spherical dielectric resonators, based on fully analytical calculations to the first order in perturbation theory. Such resonators exhibit high lifetime Mie resonances in the microwave part of the spectrum, with a separation that can be tailored with the radius of the sphere to match the expected axion frequency, allowing axion-mediated photonic transitions when particular selection rules are fulfilled. We predict experimentally accessible axion mass regimes where such triply resonant transitions can be realized with standard dielectric resonators. We propose an experiment for probing such interactions named DARK-ROSE.