Probing Majoron Dark Matter with Gravitational Wave Detectors

TL;DR

This paper explores how gravitational wave detectors can detect Majoron dark matter through photon birefringence caused by its coupling to photons, potentially probing new dark matter parameter space.

Contribution

It proposes a novel method using optical interferometers to detect Majoron dark matter via oscillatory birefringence effects.

Findings

Ground-based interferometers can probe Majoron-photon coupling within certain parameter ranges.

The model links the anomaly coefficient to electroweak and neutrino mass scales.

Additional optics can enhance the detection sensitivity of gravitational wave detectors.

Abstract

The Majoron is a hypothetical (pseudo) Nambu-Goldstone boson arising from the spontaneous breaking of a global lepton number symmetry, and is known as a candidate for dark matter in our Universe. In this paper, we investigate the possibility of probing the Majoron dark matter with a linear optical cavity used in the interferometric gravitational wave detectors. We consider a scenario in which the Majoron dark matter couples to photons through a QED anomaly, leading to an oscillatory photon birefringence induced by the coherent dark matter background. The anomaly coefficient is fixed by requiring the model to simultaneously reproduce the electroweak Higgs scale and a typical right-handed Majorana neutrino mass scale, and the resulting dark matter-photon coupling naturally falls within the sensitivity range of optical interferometers. By incorporating additional optics to extract the birefringence signal, we find that ground-based laser interferometers such as Advanced LIGO, KAGRA, as well as future detectors, can probe a region of the parameter space of Majoron dark matter.