Quantum Magnetometry in Search of Dark Matter

by Dr Itay Bloch (LBNL)

Tuesday 9 Apr 2024, 12:00 → 13:00 Europe/Madrid

IFAE Seminar Room (Face-to-face Only)

When bosonic Dark Matter (DM) has an ultra-light mass, it acts as a classical, coherent field. In many cases, and specifically for many models of axion-like-particles, this field has a magnetic-like effect on spins, and can therefore be measured by spin-based quantum magnetometers. In this seminar, I will explain the workings of quantum magnetometers, focusing on comagnetometers, which simultaneously utilize several species of atoms to achieve a variety of benefits. I will also discuss my work as one of the founding members of the Noble and Alkali Spin Detectors for Ultralight Coherent darK matter (NASDUCK) collaboration, which was formed a few years ago to measure DM with magnetometers. I will present NASDUCK's past experiments, which employed established magnetometry techniques that although familiar, have not been previously applied in DM research. I will also touch upon my involvement in three ongoing DM spin-based magnetometry experiments, each of which utilizes methods that have never been used before, neither for DM research nor for magnetometry in general. I will finish with my proposal for a novel magnetometry method, which uses what is normally seen as irreducible quantum noise, as a signal instead. This new metrological strategy opens up new directions for spin-based searches, allowing sensitivity to highly motivated DM models.