Blois 2017: 29th Rencontres de Blois on "Particle Physics and Cosmology"

Axion Dark Matter Search Experiments

Not scheduled

30m

Gaston d'Orléans

Oral Dark Matter

Speaker

Gianpaolo Carosi (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory)

Description

The nature of dark matter is one of the great mysteries of modern physics and may be the result of new particles beyond the standard model. The Axion, originally conceived as a solution to the strong-CP problem in nuclear physics, is one well-motivated candidate. In 1983 Pierre Sikivie proposed an experimental search technique, known as an axion haloscope, that relies on a large microwave cavity immersed in a strong static magnetic field to resonantly convert dark matter axions to detectable photons. This became the foundation of the Axion Dark Matter eXperiment (ADMX), which has recently began taking data at unprecedented sensitivity in the classical QCD-axion mass range of several $\mu$eV. In addition, several new detection techniques have been proposed to cover a large span of potential axion masses beyond that of the classical window. In this talk I will describe the history of axion dark matter searches and give a survey of the R&D efforts currently underway to explore the entire axion dark matter mass window.