Axion dark matter search with a photonic bandgap cavity haloscope and dielectric tuning rod over 10.25-10.45 GHz

arXiv:2608.07718 · astro-ph.CO, hep-ex · Submitted 2026-08-07 · Read on arXiv

Morgan Lynn, Ankur Agrawal, Arjun Ghosh, Sara Sussman, Steven G. Johnson, David I. Schuster, Aaron S. Chou

Department of Physics, University of Chicago · Department of Physics, University of Chicago · Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, University of Chicago, Chicago · Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory · Department of Mathematics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology · Department of Physics, University of Chicago · Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory

astro-ph.CO, hep-ex

Submitted: 2026-08-07

Updated: 2026-08-11

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The gist: We report the development of a new widely tunable cavity and demonstrate its use in a search for dark matter axions.

Terminology

Abstract

We report the development of a new widely tunable cavity and demonstrate its use in a search for dark matter axions. We achieve unloaded quality factors above 10 5, roughly 25 times larger than a bare copper cavity at the same frequency, using concentric sapphire shells to reduce Ohmic losses on the cavity barrel. A rotating sapphire rod tunes our cavity mode over the 10.1-11.7 GHz range, approximately 16% of its resonant frequency. Using an amplified receiver chain, we demonstrate sensitivity to new axion parameter space by tuning the cavity over the 200 MHz range between 10.25-10.45 GHz (42.4 - 43.2, mu eV) to constrain the axion-to-photon coupling to g a gamma gamma at most 1 times 10-12 GeV-1. This cavity can scan its tuning range about 9 times faster compared to a bare copper cavity when paired with a photon counting device, laying the groundwork for a definitive search for the QCD axion over 10.1-11.7 GHz.

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