Optical Ring Cavity Search for Axion Dark Matter

Abstract: We propose a novel experiment to search for axion dark matter which differentiates the phase velocities of the left and right-handed polarized photons. Our optical cavity measures the difference of the resonant frequencies between two circular-polarizations of the laser beam. The design of our cavity adopts double-pass configuration to realize a null experiment and give a high common mode rejection of environmental disturbances. We estimate the potential sensitivity to the axion-photon coupling constant $g_{a\gamma}$ for the axion mass $m \lesssim 10^{-10}$ eV. In a low mass range $m \lesssim 10^{-15}$ eV, we can achieve $g_{a\gamma} \lesssim 3\times 10^{-16} ~\text{GeV}^{-1}$ which is beyond the current bound by several orders of magnitude.