Detailed design of a resonantly-enhanced axion-photon regeneration experiment
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Authors
Mueller, Guido
Sikivie, Pierre
Tanner, D.B.
van Bibber, Karl
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2009-09
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Abstract
A resonantly-enhanced photon-regeneration experiment to search for the axion or axion-like particles
is described. This experiment is a shining light through walls study, where photons travelling
through a strong magnetic field are (in part) converted to axions; the axions can pass through an
opaque wall and convert (in part) back to photons in a second region of strong magnetic field. The
photon regeneration is enhanced by employing matched Fabry-Perot optical cavities, with one cavity
within the axion generation magnet and the second within the photon regeneration magnet. Compared
to simple single-pass photon regeneration, this technique would result in a gain of (F/ )2,
where F is the finesse of each cavity. This gain could feasibly be as high as 1010, corresponding
to an improvement in the sensitivity to the axion-photon coupling, ga
, of order (F/ )1/2 300.
This improvement would enable, for the first time, a purely laboratory experiment to probe axionphoton
couplings at a level competitive with, or superior to, limits from stellar evolution or solar
axion searches. This report gives a detailed discussion of the scheme for actively controlling the
two Fabry-Perot cavities and the laser frequencies, and describes the heterodyne signal detection
system, with limits ultimately imposed by shot noise.
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This work was supported in part under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy under contracts DE-FG02- 97ER41029, and DE-AC52-07NA27344. P.S. gratefully acknowledges the hospitality of the Aspen Center of Physics while working on this project.
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This publication is a work of the U.S. Government as defined in Title 17, United States Code, Section 101. Copyright protection is not available for this work in the United States.