Catch Me If You Can — Chasing Solar Axions with Helioscopes

Despite more than eighty years of research, the nature of dark matter remains one of the most profound open questions in physics. Among the leading candidates are axions, hypothetical particles originally proposed to solve the strong CP problem in quantum chromodynamics. Today, they also offer a compelling explanation for dark matter, especially as more conventional candidates like WIMPs face increasingly tight experimental constraints.

This talk will provide an introduction to axions, followed by a brief overview of current axion search efforts, with a focus on helioscope experiments. In particular, it will highlight the next-generation helioscope, the International Axion Observatory (IAXO), to be built at DESY, Hamburg. Designed to improve sensitivity to axion-photon interactions via the Primakoff effect, IAXO will explore previously inaccessible parameter space, including regions simultaneously motivated by QCD, cosmology and astrophysics. The talk will also introduce BabyIAXO, an intermediate stage towards the full IAXO experiment, currently entering its construction phase, and discuss the broader scientific potential of these next-gen experiments.