Hunt for dark matter is narrowed by new research November 15, 2017 Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Michał Rawlik of ETH Zürich and Nicholas Ayres of Sussex Uni. Credit: University of Sussex Scientists at the University of Sussex have disproved the existence of a specific type of axion - an important candidate 'dark matter' particle - across a wide range of its possible masses. Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-11-dark-narrowed.html#jCp THE PAPER: https://journals.aps.org/prx/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevX.7.041034 Search for Axionlike Dark Matter through Nuclear Spin Precession in Electric and Magnetic Fields: ABSTRACT We report on a search for ultralow-mass axionlike dark matter by analyzing the ratio of the spin-precession frequencies of stored ultracold neutrons and 199Hg atoms for an axion-induced oscillating electric dipole moment of the neutron and an axion-wind spin-precession effect. No signal consistent with dark matter is observed for the axion mass range 10−24≤ma≤10−17eV. Our null result sets the first laboratory constraints on the coupling of axion dark matter to gluons, which improve on astrophysical limits by up to 3 orders of magnitude, and also improves on previous laboratory constraints on the axion coupling to nucleons by up to a factor of 40.