Collective response and noise of a levitated ferromagnet lattice for ultralight dark matter detection
Abstract
Ultralight dark matter can induce weak oscillating magnetic-like signals and can therefore be searched for with precision magnetometry. Levitated ferromagnets provide a sensitive platform for such searches, but a single ferromagnet is limited in total polarized spin and readout performance. We investigate a levitated ferromagnet lattice as a scalable detector for ultralight dark matter. We develop a theoretical description of the collective lattice response in the fully trapped regime, incorporating dipole-dipole interactions, finite-size effects, and boundary-induced mode mixing. We further analyze the collective noise budget and show that interaction effects mainly produce a narrow blind zone through thermal-noise amplification, while away from this region, the lattice preserves favorable collective noise scaling. We then derive projected sensitivities to axion-electron, dark-photon, and axion-photon couplings. We find that the lattice improves the reach in all three channels relative to a single-ferromagnet detector, with an additional coherent signal enhancement in the axion-photon channel from the lattice-generated electromagnetic background.
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BibTeX
@misc{yang2026collective,
title = {{Collective response and noise of a levitated ferromagnet lattice for ultralight dark matter detection}},
author = {Dongyi Yang and Xiao Yang and Chenxi Sun and Jianwei Zhang},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2605.17417},
eprint = {2605.17417},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.17417},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Collective response and noise of a levitated ferromagnet lattice for ultralight dark matter detection
AU - Dongyi Yang
AU - Xiao Yang
AU - Chenxi Sun
AU - Jianwei Zhang
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/30
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2605.17417
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.17417
AB - Ultralight dark matter can induce weak oscillating magnetic-like signals and can therefore be searched for with precision magnetometry. Levitated ferromagnets provide a sensitive platform for such searches, but a single ferromagnet is limited in total polarized spin and readout performance. We investigate a levitated ferromagnet lattice as a scalable detector for ultralight dark matter. We develop a theoretical description of the collective lattice response in the fully trapped regime, incorporating dipole-dipole interactions, finite-size effects, and boundary-induced mode mixing. We further analyze the collective noise budget and show that interaction effects mainly produce a narrow blind zone through thermal-noise amplification, while away from this region, the lattice preserves favorable collective noise scaling. We then derive projected sensitivities to axion-electron, dark-photon, and axion-photon couplings. We find that the lattice improves the reach in all three channels relative to a single-ferromagnet detector, with an additional coherent signal enhancement in the axion-photon channel from the lattice-generated electromagnetic background.
ER -