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  • Open Access

Piezoelectric bulk acoustic resonators for dark photon detection

Tanner Trickle*

  • *Contact author: ttrickle@fnal.gov
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Phys. Rev. D 112, 055043 – Published 29 September, 2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/yq4n-xq9y

Abstract

The kinetically mixed dark photon is a simple, testable dark matter candidate with strong theoretical motivation. Detecting the feeble electric field dark photon dark matter produces requires extremely sensitive detectors. Bulk acoustic resonators (BARs), with their exceptionally high-quality phonon modes, are highly sensitive detectors, and have previously leveraged this sensitivity to search for gravitational waves in the MHz to GHz frequency range. The BAR phonons are typically read out by detecting the electric field generated by the BAR materials’ piezoelectricity. Here we show that this piezoelectricity also rewards such detectors sensitivity to dark photon dark matter, as the dark electric field can resonantly excite BAR phonons. A single 10 g piezoelectric BAR in a large, cold, environment can be orders of magnitude more sensitive to the kinetic mixing parameter than any current experiment, with only a month-long exposure and thermally limited backgrounds.

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Phys. Rev. D 112, 055043– Published 29 September, 2025
  • Received 12 February 2025
  • Accepted 11 September 2025
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.

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