Telescope search for a 3-eV to 8-eV axion

Experimental searches for galactic halo axions

A very light axion would be copiously produced during the Big Bang as a zero-temperature Bose gas, and it would possess vanishingly small couplings to matter and radiation. It thus represents an ideal cold dark matter candidate. Galactic halo axions may be detected by their resonant conversion to microwave photons in a high-Q cavity permeated by a strong magnetic field. A large-scale search for the axion is ongoing in the US with sufficient sensitivity to see axions of plausible model couplings. Dramatic breakthroughs in the development of near-quantum limited superconducting quantum interference device amplifiers promise to improve the sensitivity of the experiment by a factor of 30 in the near future. In Japan, a group has been developing a Rydberg atom single-quantum detector as an alternative to linear amplifiers for a microwave-cavity axion experiment. Should the axion be discovered, the predicted fine structure in the axion signal would be rich in information about the history of galactic formation.

Dark matter: theoretical perspectives

I both review and make the case for the current theoretical prejudice: a flat Universe whose dominant constituent is nonbaryonic dark matter, emphasizing that this is still a prejudice and not yet fact. The theoretical motivation for nonbaryonic dark matter is discussed in the context of current elementary-particle theory, stressing that (i) there are no dark-matter candidates within the "standard model" of particle physics, (ii) there are several compelling candidates within attractive extensions of the standard model of particle physics, and (iii) the motivation for these compelling candidates comes first and foremost from particle physics. The dark-matter problem is now a pressing issue in both cosmology and particle physics, and the detection of particle dark matter would provide evidence for "new physics." The compelling candidates are a very light axion (10(-6)-10(-4) eV), a light neutrino (20-90 eV), and a heavy neutralino (10 GeV-2 TeV). The production of these particles in the early Universe and the prospects for their detection are also discussed. I briefly mention more exotic possibilities for the dark matter, including a nonzero cosmological constant, superheavy magnetic monopoles, and decaying neutrinos.