http://arxiv.org/abs/2108.08852
In our recent companion paper [arXiv:2106.00022], we pointed out a novel signature of ultralight kinetically mixed dark-photon dark matter. This signature is a quasi-monochromatic, time-oscillating terrestrial magnetic field that takes a particular pattern over the surface of the Earth. In this work, we present a search for this signal in existing, unshielded magnetometer data recorded by geographically dispersed, geomagnetic stations. The dataset comes from the SuperMAG collaboration and consists of measurements taken with one-minute cadence since 1970, with $\mathcal{O}(500)$ stations contributing in all. We aggregate the magnetic field measurements from all stations by projecting them onto a small set of global vector spherical harmonics (VSH) that capture the expected vectorial pattern of the signal at each station. Within each dark-photon coherence time, we use a data-driven technique to estimate the broadband background noise in the data, and search for excess narrowband power in this set of VSH components; we stack the searches in distinct coherence times incoherently. Following a Bayesian analysis approach that allows us to account for the stochastic nature of the dark-photon dark-matter field, we set exclusion bounds on the kinetic mixing parameter in the dark-photon dark-matter mass range $2\times10^{-18} \text{eV} \lesssim m_{A’} \lesssim 7\times10^{-17} \text{eV}$ (corresponding to frequencies $6\times 10^{-4} \text{Hz}\lesssim f_{A’} \lesssim 2\times 10^{-2} \text{Hz}$). These limits are complementary to various existing astrophysical constraints. Although our main analysis also identifies a number of candidate signals in the SuperMAG dataset, these appear to either fail or be in strong tension with various additional robustness checks we apply to those candidates: we report no robust and significant evidence for a dark-photon dark-matter signal in the SuperMAG dataset.
M. Fedderke, P. Graham, D. Kimball, et. al.
Mon, 23 Aug 21
50/54
Comments: 41 pages, 11 figures
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