“Exploring Axion Dark Matter in the laboratory, the stars and the Universe” – Robert Ziegler (CERN)

Abstract: Standard Model extensions with a light stable axion are well-motivated by the observed Dark Matter abundance and the Peccei-Quinn solution to the Strong CP Problem. In general axions can have large flavor-violating couplings to SM fermions, which naturally arise in scenarios where the Peccei-Quinn symmetry also explains the hierarchical pattern of fermion masses and mixings. I will discuss how these couplings allow for efficient axion production from the decays of SM particles, giving the opportunity to probe flavor-violating couplings with precision flavor experiments, astrophysics and cosmology. In particular I will show that flavor facilities like MEG-II, Mu3e, NA62 and Belle-II can complement conventional QCD axion searches with halo- and helioscopes and probe generic models with flavored axion Dark Matter.