Physics (Internal)

ABRACADABRA: A New Technique To Searching for Axion Like Dark Matter

This event is part of the HEE Seminar Series.

The presence of dark matter provides some of the most tangible evidence for the existence of physics beyond the Standard Model. Separately, long standing problems within the Standard Model point to new feebly 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 uniquely elegant candidate for explaining the dark matter abundance of the Universe. ABRACADABRA is a new experimental program to search for ultralight axion-like dark matter in the sub-μeV mass range all the way down to the QCD couplings. The ABRACADABRA-10 cm prototype first took data in 2018 and demonstrated an important proof-of-principle of the detection approach. In this talk, I will discuss the detection principle behind ABRACADABRA and present the status of the second run of ABRACADABRA-10 cm, which increases the sensitivity by an order of magnitude over the 2018 results. I will also discuss the future of a meter scale detector which aims to probe the full range of QCD axion couplings.