LIGO/VIRGO DETECTORS PLACE CONSTRAINTS ON DARK PHOTON DARK MATTER

27 May 2021 — The LIGO, Virgo and KAGRA collaborations have performed the collaboration’s first search for dark photon dark matter using data from LIGO and Virgo’s third observing run. The search used two methods to strongly constrain the interaction of dark photons with gravitational-wave interferometers to less than one part in 10^46 for a wide range of the parameter space. The paper describing these new results is now available on the ArXiv preprint server. Though no signal was found, the constraints obtained from this search surpass existing ones by several orders of magnitude and show how interferometers can be used as particle physics laboratories. Read more about this analysis in the science summary.