Dark matter haloscope with a disordered dielectric absorber
Phys. Rev. D 113, 083045 – Published 27 April, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/k8l8-sqg2
Abstract
Light dark matter candidates such as axions and dark photons generically couple to electromagnetism, yielding dark-matter-to-photon conversion as a key search strategy. In addition to resonant conversion in cavities and circuits, light dark matter bosons efficiently convert to photons on material interfaces, with a broadband power proportional to the total area of these interfaces. In this work, we make use of interface conversion to develop a new experimental dark matter detector design: the disordered dielectric detector. We show that a volume filled with dielectric powder is an efficient, robust, and broadband target for axion-to-photon or dark-photon-to-photon conversion. We perform semianalytical and numerical studies in small-volume 2D and 3D disordered systems to compute the conversion power as a function of the dark matter mass. We also discuss the power gathered onto a sensitive photodetector in terms of the bulk properties of the disordered material, making it possible to characterize the predicted dark-matter-to-photon conversion rate across a wide range of wavelengths. Finally, we propose DPHaSE: the Dielectric Powder Haloscope SNSPD Experiment, which is composed of a disordered dielectric target, a veto system, and a photon collection chamber to maximize the coupling between the powder target and a low-noise superconducting nanowire single-photon detector (SNSPD). With ambitious but realistic improvements to the sensor area and detection efficiency at low energy, the projected reach in the 10 meV–eV mass range is sensitive to QCD axion-photon couplings and exceeds current constraints on dark photon dark matter by up to 5 orders of magnitude.
