New generation low-energy probes for ultralight axion and scalar dark matter

Abstract

We present a brief overview of a new generation of high-precision laboratory and astrophysical measurements to search for ultralight (sub-eV) axion, axion-like pseudoscalar and scalar dark matter (DM), which form either a coherently oscillating classical field or topological defects (solitons). In these new detection methods, the sought effects are linear in the interaction constant between DM and ordinary matter, which is in stark contrast to traditional searches for DM, where the sought effects are quadratic or higher order in the underlying interaction constants (which are extremely small).