Dissertation Defense: Sumita Ghosh, Yale University, "Harnessing HAYSTAC for Hidden Photons and Advancing Rydberg Atom-based Axion Detection"
Dark matter is the name that we give to the 85% of matter in the universe that interacts via gravity but negligibly with any of the other known forces. One compelling model for dark matter is the axion, as it simultaneously solves the existence of dark matter and the strong CP problem in QCD. Axions can interact with a strong magnetic field through the Primakoff effect, wherein the axion can spontaneously convert into a photon in the presence of a strong magnetic field.