Conceptual design of the International Axion Observatory (IAXO)

By Eric Armengaud, F. Avignone, M. Betz, P. Brax, P. Brun, G. Cantatore, J. Carmona, G. Carosi, F. Caspers, S. Caspi and 77 more. 2014

306 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The International Axion Observatory (IAXO) will be a forth generation axion helioscope. As its primary physics goal, IAXO will look for axions or axion-like particles (ALPs) originating in the Sun via the Primakoff conversion of the solar plasma photons. In terms of signal-to-noise ratio, IAXO will be about 4–5 orders of magnitude more sensitive than CAST, currently the most powerful axion helioscope, reaching sensitivity to axion-photon couplings down to a few × 10−12 GeV−1 and thus probing a large fraction of the currently unexplored axion and ALP parameter space. IAXO will also be sensitive to solar axions produced by mechanisms mediated by the axion-electron coupling gae with sensitivity — for the first time — to values of gae not previously excluded by astrophysics. With several other possible physics cases, IAXO has the potential to serve as a multi-purpose facility for generic axion and ALP research in the next decade. In this paper we present the conceptual design of IAXO, which follows the layout of an enhanced axion helioscope, based on a purpose-built 20 m-long 8-coils toroidal superconducting magnet. All the eight 60cm-diameter magnet bores are equipped with focusing x-ray optics, able to focus the signal photons into ∼ 0.2 cm2 spots that are imaged by ultra-low-background Micromegas x-ray detectors. The magnet is built into a structure with elevation and azimuth drives that will allow for solar tracking for ∼ 12 h each day.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/48a4ed7f2fb0bd3be86f19a10e592d30e73c8bdc

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

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In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

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7. P. Schuster
8. G. Lanfranchi

Citations in the corpus

• Challenges and opportunities of gravitational-wave searches at MHz to GHz frequencies (2020, background): “For example, the planned IAXO detector (Armengaud et al. 2014) aims at searching for axions produced in the core of the sun.”
• New CAST limit on the axion–photon interaction (2017, background): “new effort on a much larger scale, for example the proposed helioscope IAXO [30].”
• Standard Model—axion—seesaw—Higgs portal inflation. Five problems of particle physics and cosmology solved in one stroke (2016, background): “Figure 22: SMASH predictions for the axion-photon coupling (thick solid horizontal lines labelled as SMASHd(u) predicted in the version exploiting a hypercharge assignment of −1/3 (2/3) for Q) with current bounds on axion DM (ADMX [196],BRF) and prospects for next generation axion dark matter experi”
• Physics beyond colliders at CERN: beyond the Standard Model working group report (2019, background): “The IAXO is a new generation axion helioscope [44], aiming at the detection of solar axions with sensitivities to the axion-photon coupling g ga down to a few 10 GeV, a factor of 20 better than the current best limit from CAST (a factor of more than 10(4) improvement in signal-to-noise ratio).”
• Hot axions and the H0 tension (2018, background): “Although this does not affect our cosmological study, the additional coupling with photons are probed by axion searches [12, 13, 16, 17, 20] and they can potentially exclude regions of the parameter space.”
• The QCD axion, precisely (2015, background): “Other experiments are also being planned and several new ideas have recently been proposed to directly probe the QCD axion [19–22].”
• New experimental approaches in the search for axion-like particles (2018, background): “The dimensions of the system can be appreciated by a comparison to the human figure positioned by the rotating table [501].”
• New axion and hidden photon constraints from a solar data global fit (2015, background): “els and, as it is partly the case of the present paper, different statistical approaches to constrain particle properties. Also, it is important to keep in mind that CAST [32] and the forthcoming IAXO [33, 34] are experiments specifically designed to detect exotic particles directly from the Sun, so h”