Superfluid helium ultralight dark matter detector

Abstract

The absence of a breakthrough in directly observing dark matter (DM) through prominent large-scale detectors motivates the development of novel tabletop experiments probing more exotic regions of the parameter space. If DM contains ultralight bosonic particles, they would behave as a classical wave and could manifest through an oscillating force on baryonic matter that is coherent over ∼106 periods. Our Helium ultraLIght dark matter Optomechanical Sensor (HeLIOS) uses the high-𝑄 acoustic modes of superfluid helium-4 to resonantly amplify this signal. A superconducting reentrant microwave cavity enables sensitive optomechanical readout ultimately limited by thermal motion at millikelvin temperatures. Pressurizing the helium allows for the unique possibility of tuning the mechanical frequency to effectively broaden the DM detection bandwidth. We demonstrate the working principle of our prototype HeLIOS detector and show that future generations of HeLIOS could explore unconstrained parameter space for both scalar and vector ultralight DM after just an hour of integration time.