Seminars

Chiara Salemi: “Seeing the invisible: the search for low-mass axion dark matter”

Name: Chiara Salemi: “Seeing the invisible: the search for low-mass axion dark matter”
Start: 2022-12-06T16:00:00+00:00
End: 2022-12-06T17:00:00+00:00
Location: No location set

Tuesday 6 Dec 2022, 16:00 → 17:00 Europe/London

Description

Please note the different time slot (due to time zone issues)!

Multiple astrophysical and cosmological observations have shown that the visible matter described by the Standard Model is only a small fraction of the energy in the universe. We believe that there is about five times as much dark matter, which is likely comprised of massive particles that interact very little or not at all with other matter. One of the most well-motivated candidates to be the dark matter is the axion, a particle that is predicted by the solution to another long-standing mystery in physics, the strong CP problem. This talk discusses the first direct searches for low-mass axion dark matter. The prototype experiment ABRACADABRA-10 cm developed the innovative lumped-element detection method and set world-leading limits on axions. It also set the stage for the upcoming DMRadio program, a series of larger detectors that will be capable of finding axions or definitively excluding them over a large range of masses below 1 μeV.