A Plasma Haloscope for the Post-Inflation Axion
In Fall 2022, a consortium of the Simons Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the John Templeton Foundation and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation published a solicitation seeking to make profound advancements in physics by means of Small-Experiments of “table-top” size. The proposal “A Plasma Haloscope for the Post-Inflation Axion”, lead by the Berkely group has been announced as one of the 11 awardees among hundreds of initial proposals, for which a total of $30M over five years has been pledged by the foundations. “With this funding and also the earlier funding by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation we’re ready to start developing and building this detector that has the potential to discover axions”, says Jón Gudmundsson, senior researcher at Stockholm and current spokesperson of the ALPHA collaboration.
The nature of dark matter is one of the longest enduring cosmological mysteries. The ALPHA (Axion Longitudinal Plasma HAloscope) Consortium is working to detect the axion and help explain the underlying structure of the universe. By using a wire metamaterial to create an artificial plasma with designer properties, ALPHA will create a kind of “radio” capable of picking up axion dark matter.
“With this funding and also the earlier funding by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation we’re ready to start developing and building this detector that has the potential to discover axions”, says Jón Gudmundsson, senior researcher at Stockholm and current spokesperson of the ALPHA collaboration.
The overall collaboration comprises eleven institutions, except for Stockholm University including Berkeley, Yale, Colorado, MIT, Johns Hopkins, Wellesley, Arizona State, ITMO, Cambridge universities, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
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Jón Gudmundsson, Researcher, Fysikum
Axion DM - ALPHA (Axion Longitudinal Plasma HAloscope)
Last updated: December 15, 2023
Source: Fysikum