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Collective response and noise of a levitated ferromagnet lattice for ultralight dark matter detection

Dongyi Yang1, Xiao Yang2, Chenxi Sun2,*, and Jianwei Zhang1,†

  • 1School of Physics, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China
  • 2Beijing Key Laboratory of Quantum Sensing and Precision Measurement, Center for Quantum Information Technology, Institute of Quantum Electronics, and School of Electronics, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China

  • *Contact author: scx@pku.edu.cn
  • †Contact author: james@pku.edu.cn
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Phys. Rev. D 114, 075025 – Published 19 October, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/8b5r-s3kv

Abstract

Ultralight dark matter can induce weak oscillating magneticlike signals and can therefore be searched for with precision magnetometry. Levitated ferromagnets provide a sensitive platform for such searches, but a single ferromagnet is limited in total polarized spin and readout performance. We investigate a levitated ferromagnet lattice as a scalable detector architecture for ultralight dark matter. We develop a theoretical description of the collective lattice response in the fully trapped regime, incorporating dipole-dipole interactions, finite-size effects, and boundary-induced mode mixing. We further analyze the collective noise budget and show that interaction effects mainly produce a narrow blind zone through thermal-noise amplification, while away from this region, the lattice preserves favorable collective noise scaling. We then derive projected sensitivities to axion-electron, dark-photon, and axion-photon couplings for a reference theoretical benchmark. Under the benchmark assumptions, the lattice improves the projected reach in all three channels relative to a single-ferromagnet detector. The axion-photon channel receives an additional coherent enhancement at the level of an order-of-magnitude estimate, whose coefficient depends on the electromagnetic geometry of the lattice and shield.

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Phys. Rev. D 114, 075025– Published 19 October, 2026
  • Received 17 May 2026
  • Accepted 24 September 2026
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