Shedding Light on Dark Matter: Hunting Axions with Helioscopes

by Julia Vogel, TU Dortmund

Friday 16 May 2025, 13:15 → 15:15 Europe/Berlin

Nußallee 12/2.006 (PI) - Lecture Hall I (PI)

Despite 80 years of dark matter research, its nature remains a mystery. Axions have emerged as leading candidates, offering a compelling alternative to Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) — especially as collider and direct detection experiments tighten constraints. Originally proposed to solve a problem in quantum chromodynamics, axions naturally fit into particle physics while also explaining dark matter.

 

Axion helioscopes, such as the next-generation International Axion Observatory (IAXO) to be set up at DESY (Hamburg), search for solar axions via the Primakoff effect. IAXO aims to improve sensitivity to axion-photon coupling by 1–1.5 orders of magnitude, testing constraints from SN1987A and the axion interpretation of white-dwarf cooling. This talk explores experimental axion searches, with a focus on IAXO and its pathfinder experiment, BabyIAXO—covering their current status and expected impact.