Speaker
Jonathan Ouellet
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.
| ouelletj@mit.edu | |
| Collaboration name | ABRACADABRA |
| Funding source | NSF |
