Detecting Dark Domain Walls

Understand

Light scalar fields, with double well potentials and direct matter couplings, undergo density driven phase transitions, leading to the formation of domain walls.

• Such theories could explain dark energy, dark matter or source the nanoHz gravitational-wave background.
• We describe an experiment that could be used to detect such domain walls in a laboratory experiment, solving for the scalar field profile, and showing how the domain wall affects the motion of a test particle.
• We find that, in currently unconstrained regions of parameter space, the domain walls leave detectable signatures.