Relaxion Dark matter and How to detect it

by Abhishek Banerjee (Weizmann Institute)

Thursday 4 Jul 2019, 14:00 → 15:00 Europe/London

The cosmological relaxion can address the hierarchy problem, while its coherent oscillations can constitute dark matter in the present universe. The phenomenology of this class of models is quite unique, as it implies that, on the one hand, we are surrounded by a time-dependent axion-like field, while, on the other hand, its background behaves as a time-dependent oscillating scalar field due to the relaxion-Higgs mixing.
We consider the possibility that the relaxion forms gravitationally bound objects. The density of these objects would be higher than that of the local dark matter density, resulting in enhanced signals for table-top detectors. Furthermore, we raise the possibility that these objects may be trapped by an external gravitational potential, such as that of the Earth or the Sun. This leads to formation of relaxion halos of even greater density. We discuss several interesting implications of relaxion halos, as well as detection strategies to probe them.