The fundamental nature of dark matter is still to this day, one of the biggest mysteries in fundamental physics. Among many possible candidates, ultralight dark matter (ULDM) fields, a class of dark matter candidates whose mass is below the eV, have emerged as an alternative to historically dominant models, such as WIMPs.
In this pizza seminar, I will introduce the main general characteristics of ULDM, and I will discuss some ways of detecting one of the leading ULDM candidates, the axion. I will focus specifically on vacuum birefringence induced by its coupling to photons, and on breaking of the equivalence principle induced by its coupling to gluons.
Giada Caneva, Elia Bertoldo, Francesco Sciotti