Description:

Axions and axion-like particles may couple to nuclear spins like a weak oscillating effective magnetic field, the “axion wind.” Existing proposals for detecting the axion wind sourced by dark matter exploit analogies to nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and aim to detect the small transverse field generated when the axion wind resonantly tips the precessing spins in a polarized sample of material. We describe a new proposal using the homogeneous precession domain (HPD) of superfluid He-3 as the detection medium, where the effect of the axion wind is a small shift in the precession frequency of a large-amplitude NMR signal. Incorporating an optimal data-taking and analysis strategy, the proposed setup has competitive sensitivity to other axion wind experiments, such as CASPEr-Wind, for the axion masses below 100 neV.

Christina Gao, Postdoctoral Research Associate, University of Illinois, Urbana/Champaign

Host: William Halperin