Welcome to the ADMX Website!

You can view our latest results here.

Apparatus page has been updated.

The site is an introduction to the experiment that hopefully everybody can enjoy and learn from. If you've never heard of an Axion (the particle, not the detergent it was named after), then check out The Axion page. The explanation is one that hopefully can be understood by laypeople as well as physics undergrads. Graduate students wanting to know more should go straight to the publications page and read the abstracts of the research papers.

The goal of the Axion Dark Matter experiment is to find the elusive Axion that is a candidate for Dark Matter. As you can see from the pie chart, Dark Matter makes up more of the universe than the objects we know of (i.e. can see, like stars, or can otherwise detect, like black holes). Needless to say, figuring out what makes up Dark Matter is important to our understanding of the universe. What's more, detecting the Axion would solve another problem in physics -- that of the strong CP problem in quantum chromodynamics, which is related to the question "why is there more matter than anti-matter in the universe?"

The way the experiment works is that an Axion would be able to decay into 2 photons that we would detect. The problem is that the Axion has a very low mass, so the photons would have to be of low-energy (E=mc²). The lower the energy of the photon, the harder it is to detect. To fix this problem, the experiment includes a low-noise amplifier and cooling of the aparatus itself.

However, the data from the experiment still is not clear due to all the noise (ambient heat and electronic interference), so what will happen is that there will be 2 upgrades to the experiment. Phase I will focus on making the electronics less noisy, whereas Phase II will focus on bringing the temperature of the apparatus down. Currently the project is scheduled to go into Phase I in January 2008 and Phase II is scheduled for January 2009.