Bulletin of the American Physical Society
APS April Meeting 2021
Volume 66, Number 5
Saturday–Tuesday, April 17–20, 2021; Virtual; Time Zone: Central Daylight Time, USA
Session X20: Searches for Axion-Like ParticlesLive
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Sponsoring Units: DPF Chair: Gianpaolo Carosi, Livermore |
Tuesday, April 20, 2021 10:45AM - 10:57AM Live |
X20.00001: ALPS II Status Michael Hartman The Any Light Particle Search II (ALPS II) is a light shining through a wall (LSW) experiment to search for axion-like particles. These particles are good candidates for explaining a part of the Universe's dark matter composition as well as other physical mysteries such as photon propagation through the Universe and larger than expected stellar cooling rates. ALPS II just entered the optics installation and commissioning phase. It will use two $106\,\mathrm{m}$ long magnet strings, a $70\,\mathrm{W}$ source laser, and two high-finesse optical cavities separated by an opaque `wall'. This set-up will first generate axions in one string, and then, behind the wall, turn a minute fraction of them back into photons. The regeneration rate of ALPS II will surpass the regeneration rate of earlier LSW experiments by 12 orders of magnitude, improving the sensitivity to the coupling constant between axions and two photons by three orders of magnitude. I will report on the status of the experiment. [Preview Abstract] |
Tuesday, April 20, 2021 10:57AM - 11:09AM Live |
X20.00002: ALPS II Sensing and Control Scheme Kathy Wiech One method employed by Any Light Particle Search II (ALPS II) to search for axion-like particles is a heterodyne sensing scheme (HET). HET is capable of detecting extremely weak photon fields by measuring an interference beat note. This beat note is generated by optically mixing the weak regenerated photon field with a significantly stronger local oscillator field at a known off-set frequency. This sensing scheme is integrated into the overall sensing and control scheme which controls the frequencies of the lasers and the lengths of the cavities as well as all alignment degrees of freedom. This ALPS II sensing and control system will be presented and discussed. [Preview Abstract] |
Tuesday, April 20, 2021 11:09AM - 11:21AM Live |
X20.00003: ALPS II Data Analysis Daniel Brotherton Phenomena such as dark matter, TeV transparency, and excess stellar cooling, can be explained by the presence of axion-like particles. A new search for such particles will soon be taken up by the Any Light Particle Search II (ALPS II), a light shining through a wall experiment. To measure the weak field of the regenerated light, of order one photon per day, ALPS II will use a heterodyne interferometric sensing scheme. This sensing scheme will produce a continuous stream of valid and invalid data. I will discuss some of the data analysis techniques that will be used and how a photon per day count can be extracted out of the data. I also discuss how confidence in a detection can be established. [Preview Abstract] |
Tuesday, April 20, 2021 11:21AM - 11:33AM Live |
X20.00004: Beyond ALPS Harold Hollis The Any Light Particle Search II (ALPS II) is a light shining through a wall experiment currently in the commissioning phase at DESY. Due to begin initial science runs this year, it incorporates two identical 106 m long strings of straightened HERA superconducting 5.3 T dipole magnets. This magnet infrastructure provides opportunities for follow-on experiments beyond ALPS II. I discuss some of the experiments being considered including upgraded ALPS, searches for vacuum magnetic birefringence, searches for ultra-high frequency gravitational waves, and an interferometry Haloscope experiment. [Preview Abstract] |
Tuesday, April 20, 2021 11:33AM - 11:45AM Live |
X20.00005: Optimizing the HAYSTAC Livetime Michael Jewell The HAYSTAC Collaboration is currently searching for axion cold dark matter with the use of resonant microwave cavities. Because both the mass of the axion and its coupling strength are largely unknown, a key figure of merit for a haloscope is the rate at which it can scan this vast parameter space. Recent progress in developing squeezed state receivers have allowed HAYSTAC to reduce noise levels below the standard quantum limit, resulting in a factor two scan rate enhancement [1]. In addition to noise, another major source of scan rate degradation currently comes from dead/lost time accrued while acquiring each average power spectrum. This talk will outline improvements made to the data acquisition routine which have allowed the livetime to be nearly doubled from 50{\%} to 90{\%}. These livetime improvements, in addition to an improved detector design, will allow for further increase in experimental sensitivity. [1] K. M. Backes et al. A quantum-enhanced search for dark matter axions. arxiv:2008.01853 (2020). [Preview Abstract] |
Tuesday, April 20, 2021 11:45AM - 11:57AM Live |
X20.00006: Searching for Axion-like Particles at Rare Nuclear Isotope Accelerator Facilities Doojin Kim Rare nuclear isotope accelerator facilities provide high-flux proton beams to produce a large number of rare nuclear isotopes. The high-intensity nature of their beams enables investigating dark sector particles including axion-like particles (ALPs). In this talk, I will discuss detection prospects of ALP, using its coupling to Standard Model photons, in a recently proposed experiment at RAON, the rare isotope accelerator complex for online experiment constructed in Korea. Thanks to the low 600-MeV proton beam energy, the backgrounds produced in the target and subsequently entering the detector are greatly suppressed. Together with the high intensity nature of the proton beams, I will demonstrate that RAON is capable of probing the region of ALP parameter space below the so-called ``cosmological triangle'', benefiting from a high-intensity photon flux and maximizing the on-axis angular coverage. I will further show that the close proximity of the detector to the ALP production dump makes it possible to probe a high-mass region of ALP parameter space which has never been explored by the existing experiments. [Preview Abstract] |
Tuesday, April 20, 2021 11:57AM - 12:09PM Live |
X20.00007: A Simulation Study of Neutron Production and Moderation for Axion-like Particles (ALPs) search at Rare Isotope Accelerator complex for ON-line (RAON) Wooyoung Jang, Doojin Kim, Min Sang Ryu, Kyongchul Kong, Youngjoon Kwon, Jong-Chul Park, Seodong Shin, Un-Ki Yang, Jaehoon Yu Axion-like Particles (ALPs) are viable candidates for dark matter and can interact with the Standard Model photons through the Primakoff scattering. This enables a search for ALPs in a beam dump experiment at a high-intensity beam facility, such as the Rare Isotope Accelerator complex for ON-line experiment (RAON), under construction in Korea. The proposed Dark Matter Searches at Accelerator (DMSA) is an experiment to take advantage of this facility to be in operation shortly in Korea. The main physics goal of DMSA is searching for ALPs and other dark sector particles using 1 m thick iron beam dump and a 610-ton liquid argon time projection chamber (LAr TPC) situated immediate downstream of the dump. The neutrons and neutrinos produced in the proton interactions in the dump are crucial background to search for ALPs which are charge neutral. Therefore, evaluating the effect of these backgrounds is a critical step in designing such experiments. In this presentation, we present our background study based on GEANT4 simulation. We examine the production process of neutrons in the dump, and the impact of the moderators of various materials and thicknesses to determine optimal dimension of the moderator for neutron background mitigation. [Preview Abstract] |
Tuesday, April 20, 2021 12:09PM - 12:21PM Live |
X20.00008: Constraints on Axion-Like Particles from a Hard X-Ray Observation of Betelgeuse Mengjiao Xiao, Kerstin Perez, Maurizio Giannotti, Oscar Straniero, Alessandro Mirizzi, Brian Grefenstette, Brandon Roach, Melania Nynka Axion-like particles (ALPs) can be produced in stellar plasmas via the Primakoff process due to the photon-ALP coupling. Light ALPs produced in this way can easily escape the star and be converted back into photons in the Galactic magnetic field. Betelgeuse ($\alpha$-Orionis, spectral type M2Iab), a nearby red supergiant star, provides an excellent laboratory for ALP searches, as it (i) has a hot core, and thus is potentially a copious producer of ALPs that, after re-conversion, produces a photon signal peaked in the hard X-ray (E$>$10 keV) range, (ii) is in region of Hertzsprung-Russel diagram where no stable corona is expected, and thus has essentially zero standard astrophysical X-ray background, and (iii) is nearby, at a distance d~200 pc, and thus in a region of the local magnetic field that is relatively easier to constrain with future observations. We use the first observation of Betelgeuse in hard X-rays to perform a novel search for ALPs. With a 50 ks observation by the NuSTAR satellite telescope, we find no significant excess of events above the expected background and set a stringent upper limit on the ALP-photon coupling. In this contribution, I will detail this work while focusing on the data analysis, results and impact, and emphasizing the uncertainty. [Preview Abstract] |
Tuesday, April 20, 2021 12:21PM - 12:33PM Live |
X20.00009: Study of Neutron Induced Backgrounds to the Axion-like Particle Search at RAON Facility in Korea MinSang RYU, Wooyoung Jang, Doojin Kim, Kyoungchul Kong, Youngjoon Kwon, Jong-Chul Park, Seodong Shin, Un-Ki Yang, Jaehoon Yu Rare nuclear isotope accelerator facility, such as Rare isotope Accelerator complex for ON-line experiment (RAON) which is under construction in Korea provides an excellent opportunity for exploring beyond the standard model physics, thanks to the high intensity proton beams at 600MeV. A beam dump experiment at such facility provides opportunities to search dark sector particles such as axion-like particles (ALPs) and dark photons. To take advantage of the new facility to be in operation shortly in Korea, we have proposed the Dark Matter Searches at Accelerators (DMSA) experiment whose primary goals are to search for ALP and other dark sector particles using a 1m thick iron beam dump and a 610-ton liquid argon time projection chamber (LAr TPC) detector in close proximity to the dump. The most concerned primary background to ALP searches at DMSA, given the proximity to the source of the beam, namely the dump is the secondary electromagnetic particles produced in the interactions of neutrons resulting from the high intensity 600MeV proton beams impinging on the iron dump. In this talk, we will present a detailed GEANT4 based study on the neutron induced backgrounds to the ALP search at DMSA beam dump experiment, including potential background mitigation strategy. [Preview Abstract] |
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