Axions not confirmed by PVLAS

From PhysicsWeb News: “The existence of a hypothetical particle called the axion has been put into further doubt now that the team that first claimed its discovery has failed to reproduce their results. Physicists working on the PVLAS experiment in Italy say that the tiny rotation in the polarization of laser light that they reported last year does not support the existence of axions, but rather is an artifact related to how the experiment had been performed”¹.

1. E. Zavattini et al., “New PVLAS results and limits on magnetically induced optical rotation and ellipticity in vacuum“, arXiv:0706.3419v1 (2007) [↩]