The Hunt for Axion Dark Matter

The dark matter problem is 100 years old. We are in the embarrassing position of not knowing what most of the matter in the universe consists of. One idea is that a fairly obscure particle called the axion might constitute some or all of the dark matter in the Universe, and that axions might be all around us in enormous numbers, rather like neutrinos. After surveying the astronomical evidence for the existence of dark matter,  Ed will describe a search for axion dark matter conducted at The University of Sheffield in a dilution refrigerator, and the connections of this research to superconducting quantum computing. 

Ed Daw did his undergraduate degree in Oxford and his Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, both in physics. The common theme in his research is searches for faint signals. He is a member of the LIGO scientific collaboration, which in 2015 announced the first…