Speaker
Description
In the context of unveiling the Dark Matter problem, in recent years the tentative of detecting axions has made its way. QUAX is an haloscope experiment based in Legnaro (INFN-LNL) and Frascati (INFN-LNF), Italy, designed to detect axions through two different interactions with matter: the axion-photon interaction (QUAX-a$\gamma$) and the axion-electron spin interaction (QUAX-ae). Here I present the status of the QUAX-a$\gamma$ experiment, the recent results and its future prospects.
Recently, QUAX-a$\gamma$ has reached a milestone in the field, operating the haloscope with a JPA at the quantum limit and reaching a sensitivity to the axion QCD band, becoming a competitor experiment in the panorama. This was possible with the haloscope at Legnaro, where a resonant cavity was put in a 8 T magnetic field at a temperature of about 200 mK, while the noise temperature resulted in less than 1 K. This allowed us to put an average upper limit to the axion-photon coupling of $g_{a\gamma\gamma} = 0.766 \times 10^{-13}~$ GeV$^{-1}$ at 90% confidence level, for an axion mass of $m_a=43~\mu$eV.
A new haloscope is being assembled in Frascati: there, a dilution refrigerator with base temperature of 10 mK is now available, and this will host a 9 T magnet. The R&D of resonant cavities continues to test superconducting materials to build cavities with, as Nb$_{3}$Sn, and also consists in designing a frequency scan scheme. This is possible either with a usual tuning rod inside the cavity, or inserting a multiple cavity in the magnetic field.
| Speaker | Alessio Rettaroli |
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