View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Calhoun, Institutional Archive of the Naval Postgraduate School Calhoun: The NPS Institutional Archive Faculty and Researcher Publications Faculty and Researcher Publications 2009-04-21 Axions as Dark Matter Particles Duffy, Leanne D. http://hdl.handle.net/10945/35430 Axions as Dark Matter Particles Leanne D. Duffy1 and Karl van Bibber2 1 Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM 87545, USA 2 Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, CA 94550, USA and the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA 93943, USA E-mail:
[email protected],
[email protected] Abstract. We review the current status of axions as dark matter. Motivation, models, constraints and experimental searches are outlined. The axion remains an excellent candidate for the dark matter and future experiments, particularly the Axion Dark Matter eXperiment (ADMX), will cover a large fraction of the axion parameter space. arXiv:0904.3346v1 [hep-ph] 21 Apr 2009 Axions as Dark Matter Particles 2 1. Introduction Despite our knowledge of dark matter’s properties, what it consists of is still a mystery. The standard model of particle physics does not contain a particle that qualifies as dark matter. Extensions to the standard model do, however, provide viable particle candidates. The axion, the pseudo-Nambu-Goldstone boson of the Peccei- Quinn solution to the strong CP problem [1, 2, 3, 4], is a strongly motivated particle candidate. We review the strong CP problem and its resulting axion in section 2. In the early universe, cold axion populations arise from vacuum realignment [5, 6, 7] and string and wall decay [8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20].