Manifestations of dark matter and variations of fundamental constants in atoms and astrophysical phenomena

Abstract

We present an overview of recent developments in the detection of light bosonic dark matter, including axion, pseudoscalar axion-like and scalar dark matter, which form either a coherently oscillating classical field or topological defects (solitons). We emphasise new high-precision laboratory and astrophysical measurements, in which the sought effects are linear in the underlying interaction strength between dark matter and ordinary matter, in contrast to traditional detection schemes for dark matter, where the effects are quadratic or higher order in the underlying interaction parameters and are extremely small. New terrestrial experiments include measurements with atomic clocks, spectroscopy, atomic and solid-state magnetometry, torsion pendula, ultracold neutrons, and laser interferometry. New astrophysical observations include pulsar timing, cosmic radiation lensing, Big Bang nucleosynthesis and cosmic microwave background measurements. We also discuss various recently proposed mechanisms for the induction of slow `drifts', oscillating variations and transient-in-time variations of the fundamental constants of Nature by dark matter, which offer a more natural means of producing a cosmological evolution of the fundamental constants compared with traditional dark energy-type theories, which invoke a (nearly) massless underlying field. Thus, measurements of variation of the fundamental constants gives us a new tool in dark matter searches.