Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: We study the purely gravitational signatures of dark matter from the ultralight to the ultraheavy mass range in proposed long-baseline atom gradiometers, focusing on terrestrial designs, such as AION-km and MAGIS-km, as well as space-based concepts, such as MAGIS-space, AEDGE and AEDGE + . Due to its exceptional acceleration sensitivity and depending on astrophysical backgrounds, a detector similar to AEDGE + could detect a dark matter subcomponent which constitutes O ( 10 % ) of the local dark matter energy density and is populated by compact clumps of mass between 10 6 kg and 10 10 kg ( 10 − 25 M ⊙ ≲ M ≲ 10 − 21 M ⊙ ) in an otherwise unexplored region of dark matter model space. Furthermore, because the gravitational observable depends on the relative gravitational time delay measured by spatially separated atomic clouds, we find that atom gradiometers are parametrically more sensitive than laser interferometers, such as LIGO and LISA, to fast-oscillating spacetime perturbations sourced by energy density and pressure fluctuations of ultralight dark matter. Depending on astrophysical backgrounds, a detector akin to AEDGE + could probe a DM overdensity of O ( 10 ) times the local dark matter energy density for masses m ≲ 10 − 17 eV .
DOI: 10.1103/xs7b-zgtj
Language: English
Subfield: Nuclear and High Energy Physics
Field: Physics and Astronomy
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Funders: National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Energy, California Institute of Technology, Resnick Sustainability Institute for Science, Energy and Sustainability, California Institute of Technology, Heising-Simons Foundation, Office of Science, Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics, High Energy Physics, Fermilab
OpenAlex ID: W4414145286