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High Energy Phenomenology Seminar: Christina Gao (UIUC) "Axion wind detection with the homogeneous precession domain of superfluid helium-3"

Speaker: Christina Gao (UIUC)
Date: 9/2/2022
Time: 11 a.m.
Location: Room 464
Event Contact: Brandy Koebbe
BKOEBBE@ILLINOIS.EDU
Sponsor: Department of Physics
Event Type: Seminar/Symposium
 
Axions and axion-like particles may couple to nuclear spins like a weak oscillating effective magnetic field. Existing proposals for detecting this "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 3He 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. We argue that this setup can provide broadband detection of multiple axion masses simultaneously, and has competitive sensitivity to other axion wind experiments such as CASPEr-Wind at masses below 10−7 eV by exploiting precision frequency metrology in the readout stage.