Probing dark photons with plasma haloscopes

Understand

Dark photons (DPs) produced in the early Universe are well-motivated dark matter (DM) candidates.

• We show that the recently proposed tunable plasma haloscopes are particularly advantageous for DP searches.
• While in-medium effects suppress the DP signal in conventional searches, plasma haloscopes make use of metamaterials that enable resonant absorption of the DP by matching its mass to a tunable plasma frequency and thus enable efficient plasmon production.
• Using thermal field theory, we confirm the in-medium DP absorption rate within the detector.