CERN Accelerating science

CAST

Casting light on the dark sector of the universe

On axions The cosmologically established cold dark matter (CDM) makes about 84% of the Universe's total mass. In the era of precision cosmology, the composition of the CDM remains a mystery. Among the proposed hypothetical particles which could…

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CAST: from Solar to Dark Matter Axions searches

*/ CERN’s Axion Solar telescope (CAST) has been running since 2003 searching for the axion: a hypothetical particle introduced in 1978 as a consequence of the Peccei-Quinn mechanism aiming to solve the strong CP problem, i.e why is the neutron…

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Searching for axions: old and new ideas

QCD, the theory of strong interactions allows the violation of CP symmetry that would result in a non-zero value for the neutron electric dipole moment. Current measurements constrain the neutron EDM to be one trillionth of the size predicted by QCD…

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Search for axions in streaming dark matter

    Streaming dark matter (DM) axions may be the better source for their discovery than the widely assumed isotropic DM. Because, a large axion flux enhancement can take place, temporally, due to gravitational lensing when the Sun and/or a planet…

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