Superconducting cavities are at the heart of many particle accelerators, boosting particles to extremely high energies. Under the right conditions, however, the hollow niobium structures can also be used to probe phenomena that have hardly been explored so far. These include gravitational waves, which reach Earth from major galactic events, and axions, which may constitute the enigmatic dark matter but are extremely difficult to detect. DESY researcher Krisztian Peters has now secured the exceptionally high sum of 3.4 million euros from the European Research Council (ERC) to develop a new detector within the project SONAR ("Superconducting Oscillator for Novel Astrophysical Radiation"), whose core components are two such cavities.
Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY
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