looking at the Sun, through the freakin' walls

In the CCPP Brown-Bag talk, Duccio Pappadopulo (NYU) gave a very nice and intuitive introduction to the strong CP problem (although he really presented it as the strong T problem!). He discussed the motivation for the QCD axion and then experimental bounds on it. He mentioned at the end his own work that permits the QCD axion to have much stronger couplings to photons, and therefore be much more readily detected in the laboratory. He discussed an important kind of experiment that I had not heard about previously: The helioscope, which is an x-ray telescope in a strong magnetic field, looking at the Sun, but inside a shielded building (search "axion helioscope"). That is, the experiment asks the question: Can we see through the walls? This tests the coupling of the QCD sector and the photon to the axion, because (QCD) axions are created in the Sun, and some will convert (using the magnetic field to obtain a free photon) into x-ray photons at the helioscope. Crazy, but seriously these are real experiments! I love my job.