17–22 Jun 2018
DESY in Hamburg
Europe/Berlin timezone

ABRACADABRA: A New Approach to the Search for Axion Dark Matter

20 Jun 2018, 09:35
20m
Auditorium (DESY in Hamburg)

Auditorium

DESY in Hamburg

Notkestraße 85 22607 Hamburg Germany
Presentation Plenary presentations

Speaker

Prof. Lindley Winslow (MIT)

Description

The evidence for the existence of Dark Matter is well supported by many cosmological observations. Separately, long standing problems within the Standard Model point to new weakly interacting particles to help explain away unnatural fine-tunings. The axion was originally proposed to explain the Strong-CP problem, but was subsequently shown to be a strong candidate for explaining the Dark Matter abundance of the Universe. ABRACADABRA is a proposed experiment to search for ultralight axion Dark Matter, with a focus on the mass range $10^{-14} < m_a < 10^{-6}$ eV. We search for these axions and other axion like particles (ALPs) through a modification to Maxwell's equations, which cause strong magnetic fields to source weak oscillating electrical currents parallel to the field. In this talk, I will describe the working principle behind the ABRACADABRA experiment as well as the prototype that we are running at MIT called ABRACADABRA-10 cm.

Summary

The most recent results from ABRACADABRA-10 cm will be presented.

Primary author

Prof. Lindley Winslow (MIT)

Presentation materials