Search for topological defect of axionlike model with cesium atomic comagnetometer*

Abstract

Many terrestrial experiments have been designed to detect domain walls composed of axions or axionlike particles (ALPs), which are promising candidates of dark matter. When the domain wall crosses over the Earth, the pseudoscalar field of ALPs could couple to the atomic spins. Such exotic spin-dependent couplings can be searched for by monitoring the transient-in-time change of the atomic spin precession frequency in the presence of a magnetic field. We propose here a single-species cesium atomic comagnetometer, which measures the spin precession frequencies of atoms in different ground-state hyperfine levels, to eliminate the common-mode magnetic-field variations and search for the exotic non-magnetic couplings solely between protons and ALPs. With the single-species atomic comagnetometer, we experimentally rule out the possibility that the decay constant of the linear pseudoscalar couplings of ALPs to protons is f p ≲ 3.71 × 107 GeV. The advanced system has the potential to constrain the constant to be f p ≲ 10.7 × 109 GeV, promising to improve astrophysical constraint level by at least one order of magnitude. Our system could provide a sensitive detection method for the global network of optical magnetometers to search for exotic physics.