Hunting for Hidden Photons in the Wilderness: the Search for Non-Interacting Particles Experiment (SNIPE Hunt)

Recently, it was proposed that the Earth itself could act as a transducer for ultralight dark-matter detection [1]. In particular, interaction of kinetically mixed hidden-photon dark matter with the Earth and the surrounding space environment (e.g., the ionosphere) generates a characteristic coherent magnetic field signal pattern across the surface of the Earth that can be searched for using unshielded magnetometers [2]. We plan to search for signals from hidden-photon dark matter with Compton frequencies in the 0.1-100 Hz range by performing correlated measurements with a network of atomic magnetometers in relatively quiet magnetic environments (in the wilderness far from human-generated magnetic noise).