Dark matter induced Brownian motion
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Regular Article - Theoretical Physics
Dark matter induced Brownian motion Ting Cheng1,3,a , Reinard Primulando2,b , Martin Spinrath1,c 1
Department of Physics, National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu 30013, Taiwan Department of Physics, Center for Theoretical Physics, Parahyangan Catholic University, Jl. Ciumbuleuit 94, Bandung 40141, Indonesia 3 Present Address: Max-Planck-Institut für Kernphysik, Heidelberg, Germany
2
Received: 25 February 2020 / Accepted: 22 May 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract We discuss a novel approach for directional, light dark matter searches inspired by the high precision position measurements achieved in gravitational wave detectors. If dark matter interacts with ordinary matter, movable masses are subject to an effect similar to Brownian motion induced by the scattering with dark matter particles which exhibits certain characteristics and could be observed. We provide estimates for the sensitivity of a hypothetical experiment looking for that motion. Interestingly, if successful, our approach would allow to constrain the local distribution of dark matter momentum.
1 Introduction Cosmological and astrophysical data provides overwhelming evidence for dark matter (DM). Unfortunately, this data does not tell us anything definite about the nature of DM itself. To solve this riddle, there has been tremendous experimental effort in the last decades focussing, in particular, on theoretically well-motivated weakly interacting TeV scale DM, so called Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs). These efforts remain until today without any conclusive evidence for a discovery. For that reason, recently other potential mass regions for DM are more seriously considered and new ideas are developed to test them experimentally, see, e.g. [1]. In this paper we follow this line and discuss a novel experimental approach for light DM. As we will see our method would work, in principle, to very small masses. However, under more realistic assumptions, its sensitivity lies in the range above about 10 MeV/c2 . Our proposal is motivated by the great achievements in laser interferometry for gravitational wave detectors, but as a e-mail:
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we will see later LIGO and other current earth-bound gravitational wave detectors are not well suited for our method. We are not the first to propose to use gravitational wave detectors or interferometers in general as DM detectors, see for instance [2–11]. Nevertheless, our approach is very different from theirs. They usually focus on very light DM with masses well below 1 keV/c2 , where DM behaves more like a classical field with a very long wave-length. In our method the particle nature of DM is essential. In fact, it is loosely inspired by the work of one of the authors [12]. Interestingly, results of the KWISP detector were presented which is looking for dark energy particles with an opto-mechanical setup [13] somewhat simi
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