Abstract
Uncovering the nature of dark matter is one of the most important goals of particle physics. Light bosonic particles, such as the dark photon, are well-motivated candidates: they are generally long-lived, weakly interacting, and naturally produced in the early universe. In this work, we report on Light Multilayer Periodic Optical SNSPD Target, a proof-of-concept experiment searching for dark photon dark matter in the eV mass range, via coherent absorption in a multilayer dielectric haloscope. Using a superconducting nanowire single-photon detector (SNSPD), we achieve efficient photon detection with a dark count rate of . We find no evidence for dark photon dark matter in the mass range of with kinetic mixing , improving existing limits in by up to a factor of 2. With future improvements to SNSPDs, our architecture could probe significant new parameter space for dark photon and axion dark matter in the meV to 10 eV mass range.
- Received 22 October 2021
- Revised 29 April 2022
- Accepted 13 May 2022
- Corrected 22 December 2022
- Corrected 29 September 2022
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.128.231802
Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.
Published by the American Physical Society
Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)
Corrections
29 September 2022
Correction: Reference [53] and its citation in the penultimate paragraph were missing and have been inserted.
22 December 2022
Second Correction: A missing support statement has been added to the Acknowledgments section.