0000000000200901
AUTHOR
Alessio Notari
Axion search with BabyIAXO in view of IAXO
Axions are a natural consequence of the Peccei-Quinn mechanism, the most compelling solution to the strong-CP problem. Similar axion-like particles (ALPs) also appear in a number of possible extensions of the Standard Model, notably in string theories. Both axions and ALPs are very well motivated candidates for Dark Matter, and in addition, they would be copiously produced at the sun's core. A relevant effort during the last decade has been the CAST experiment at CERN, the most sensitive axion helioscope to-date. The International Axion Observatory (IAXO) is a large-scale 4th generation helioscope. As its primary physics goal, IAXO will look for solar axions or ALPs with a signal to backgro…
Observational constraints on inhomogeneous cosmological models without dark energy
It has been proposed that the observed dark energy can be explained away by the effect of large-scale nonlinear inhomogeneities. In the present paper we discuss how observations constrain cosmological models featuring large voids. We start by considering Copernican models, in which the observer is not occupying a special position and homogeneity is preserved on a very large scale. We show how these models, at least in their current realizations, are constrained to give small, but perhaps not negligible in certain contexts, corrections to the cosmological observables. We then examine non-Copernican models, in which the observer is close to the center of a very large void. These models can gi…
Next Generation Search for Axion and ALP Dark Matter with the International Axion Observatory
International audience; More than 80 years after the postulation of dark matter, its nature remains one of the fundamental questions in cosmology. Axions are currently one of the leading candidates for the hypothetical, non-baryonic dark matter that is expected to account for about 25% of the energy density of the Universe. Especially in the light of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN slowly closing in on Weakly-Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP) searches, axions and axion-like particles (ALPs) provide a viable alternative approach to solving the dark matter problem. The fact that makes them particularly appealing is that they were initially introduced to solve a long-standing problem in qu…