Scanning the landscape of axion dark matter detectors: applying gradient descent to experimental design

Understand

The hunt for dark matter remains one of the principal objectives of modern physics and cosmology.

• Searches for dark matter in the form of axions are proposed or underway across a range of experimental collaborations.
• As we look to the next generation of detectors, a natural question to ask is whether there are new experimental designs waiting to be discovered and how we might find them.
• Here we take a new approach to the experimental design procedure by using gradient descent techniques to search for optimal detector designs.