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HK: Fachverband Physik der Hadronen und Kerne

HK 25: Fundamentale Symmetrien

HK 25.4: Talk

Wednesday, March 21, 2012, 15:00–15:15, P 1

³He/¹²⁹Xe Clock Comparison Experiment: Search for Spin-dependent Short-range Interaction — •Kathlynne Tullney¹, Werner Heil¹, Sergei Karpuk¹, Yuri Sobolev¹, Martin Burghoff², Silvia Knappe-Grüneberg², Wolfgang Kilian², Wolfgang Müller², Allard Schnabel², Frank Seifert², Lutz Trahms², and Ulrich Schmidt³ — ¹Universität Mainz — ²PTB Berlin — ³Universität Heidelberg

Light pseudoscalar bosons, such as the axion that was originally proposed as a solution of the strong CP problem, would cause a new spin-dependent short-range interaction. Of interest here is the search for axion mediated short range interaction between a fermion and the spin of another fermion. To search for this effect co-located, nuclear spin polarized ³He and ¹²⁹Xe atoms are used to get rid of magnetic field drifts. The new approach we made is to measure the free nuclear spin precession frequencies in a homogeneous magnetic guiding field of about 400 nT using LT_C SQUID detectors. The whole setup is housed in a magnetically shielded room at the Physikalisch Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) in Berlin. With this setup long nuclear-spin coherence times of several hours for both gases can be achieved.
In this talk we present results of the last run in September 2010 which gives new upper limits on the scalar-pseudoscalar coupling of axion-like particles in the axion-mass window from 10⁻² eV to 10⁻⁶ eV.