event
Friday 28 Feb 2014: Colloquium: Dark matter searchers with Josephson junctions
Prof. Christian Beck - Queen Mary University of London
Newman Red 12:00-13:00
After a brief overview on direct search experiments for dark matter particles I will concentrate on axionic dark matter.
Axions were originally introduced to solve the strong CP problem, but they are also a very interesting dark matter
candidate.
I will decribe recent theoretical ideas to use S/N/S Josephson junctions as suitable axion detectors, and discuss a candidate signal of unknown origin observed by an experimental group in Grenoble, which interpreted in this way would point to an axion mass of 0.11 meV and a local axion density of 0.05 GeV/cm^3 [1]. I will discuss future
experimental checks to either confirm or refute the dark matter nature of this signal.
[1] C. Beck, Phys. Rev. Lett. 111, 222501 (2013)
