Speaker
Description
Ultralight bosons provide well-motivated candidates for physics beyond the Standard Model and may couple weakly to photons or fermions. If sourced by laboratory-scale objects, such fields can generate long-range potentials that imprint measurable phase shifts or induce currents in superconducting Josephson systems. In particular, an oscillating axion dark matter background can produce an Aharonov-Bohm-like phase in an rf-SQUID loop, where the resulting axion-induced current may modify the voltage readout in the presence of an external magnetic field. Similarly, ultralight axions can mix with photons, and an adiabatically varying magnetic field can generate an axion-induced Berry phase in a Mach-Zehnder interferometer. I will discuss how such precision measurements of these geometric and topological phases offer a quantum interferometric route to probe ultralight bosons and their feeble couplings to Standard Model particles.