Searches for solar axions began a decade ago when the US Brookhaven Laboratory first pointed an axion telescope at the Suna highly useful source of weakly interacting particles for fundamental research, as the solar neutrino anomaly amply demonstrates. Axions would be produced in the Sun through the scattering of photons from electric charges -the Primakoff effect -and their numbers could equal those of solar neutrinos. The idea behind the Brookhaven experiment, first proposed by Pierre Sikivie, was to put the Primakoff effect to work in reverse, using a magnetic field to catalyse the conversion of solar axions back into X-ray photons of a few kilo-electronvolts.
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