Jonathan Ouellet (MIT)

Date: Tue. November 13th, 2018, 11:30 am-12:30 pm

First Results from the ABRACADABRA-10cm Prototype

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
and present the first results from a prototype experiment called
ABRACADABRA-10cm that we have built at MIT.

Host: Monreal/Gladstone