dc.contributor.advisor Heckel, Blayne R dc.contributor.author Chen, Yi dc.date.accessioned 2019-02-22T17:08:02Z dc.date.available 2019-02-22T17:08:02Z dc.date.submitted 2018 dc.identifier.other Chen_washington_0250E_19508.pdf dc.identifier.uri http://hdl.handle.net/1773/43441 dc.description Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2018 dc.description.abstract The objective of this dissertation is to search for axion dark matter through the coupling between the axion field and the electric dipole moment(EDM) of mercury-199 atoms. If the axion is the significant fraction of dark matter, the coupling leads to a time-varying nuclear EDM that oscillates at the frequency proportional to the axion mass, $m_{a}$. We use the data that measures the static EDM of $^{199}Hg$ atoms to look for a simple sinusoidal signal on the top of the static EDM value. The Lomb-Scargle periodogram, as a power spectrum estimator, allows us to analyze our unequally spaced EDM data in time. With two different approaches both with and without error weighting, they give a consistent result on no detection of dark matter. The most significant peak among the four EDM periodograms has a false alarm probability of 31$\%$ calculated with the Bootstrap method. The magnitude of the maximum peak can be generated by injecting a sinusoidal signal with the amplitude of 1.81$\times 10^{-29}$ $e \cdot cm$. The smallest periodic signal our measurement can detect as the maximum peak in the periodogram with 95$\%$ confidence in the frequency range of 0 to 6.17$\times 10^{-4}$ Hz is 2.3$\times 10^{-29}$ $e \cdot cm$. The static EDM of $^{199}Hg$ by itself is an important topic. This thesis will only briefly mention it and mainly cover the parts that are relevant to time-varying EDM analysis. dc.format.mimetype application/pdf dc.language.iso en_US dc.rights none dc.subject Bootstrap dc.subject electric dipole moment dc.subject periodogram dc.subject time-varying EDM dc.subject Atomic physics dc.subject.other Physics dc.title Axion-like Dark Matter Detection with Mercury-199 Atoms dc.type Thesis dc.embargo.terms Open Access
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