The result was achieved with relatively limited resources, demonstrating that small-scale experiments can make a meaningful contribution to one of the most open challenges in modern physics.
The project was funded through a student research grant provided by the University of Hamburg via the Hub for Crossdisciplinary Learning, which supports independent research initiatives. The team also received support from the MADMAX dark matter experiment, a much larger and more complex undertaking that carries out a similar search. "We were kind of embedded in the research group of the MADMAX dark matter experiment," said Nabil Salama, one of the authors. "MADMAX carries out a similar experiment on a much larger and more complex scale, and we benefited from their expertise and support."
Additional support came from the Quantum Universe Cluster of Excellence, which provided access to key equipment including the magnet used in the experiment.
Axions are theorized to be present throughout the galaxy, which means any location is suitable for conducting a search. "The benefit of working with dark matter, or axions, is that we expect it to be present everywhere in our galaxy," said Agit Akgumus, first author of the study alongside Salama. "So essentially, no matter where you perform the experiment, you have some dark matter on your hand you can do experiments with."
The experimental setup centered on a resonant cavity made from highly conductive materials, along with necessary electronics, cabling, supports, and measurement instruments. "The detector we built is essentially the simplest version of a cavity detector for dark matter," said Salama. The team relied partly on existing infrastructure and equipment provided by the university and collaborating research groups, rather than building entirely from scratch.
After testing, calibrating, and operating the detector to collect data, the team found no signal attributable to axions. Rather than a failure, this constitutes a meaningful scientific result: it allows researchers to exclude the presence of axions with certain properties within the explored mass range, particularly those with stronger interactions with photons, thereby narrowing the parameter space for future searches.
"Our results are naturally more limited than those of larger experiments. Performance scales with resources and complexity. However, we have shown that it is possible to reduce these setups to a much smaller scale - even to projects developed almost independently by students - while still producing real scientific data," said Akgumus.
"The search for axions involves exploring a wide range of possible parameters," he added. "Our experiment covers only a small region, with limited sensitivity, but it still helps narrow down the possibilities. To actually find the particle, we need either much larger experiments or many different ones, each probing a specific region."
During peer review, a referee suggested that once the axion is discovered and its mass determined, experiments of this kind could become accessible enough for use in teaching laboratories. "We were told that setups like ours could one day become standard student lab experiments," said Salama. "In a way, we may have anticipated that future, showing that it is already possible to build and operate such an experiment on a small scale."
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