Dark matter, variation of fundamental constants and violation of fundamental symmetries

Low-mass boson dark matter particles produced after Big Bang form classical field and/or topological defects. In contrast to traditional dark matter searches, effects produced by interaction of an ordinary matter with this field and defects may be first power in the underlying interaction strength rather than the second power or higher (which appears in a traditional search for the dark matter). This may give an enormous advantage since the dark matter interaction constant is extremely small. Interaction between the density of the dark matter particles and ordinary matter produces both ‘slow’ cosmological evolution and oscillating variations of the fundamental constants including the fine structure constant alpha and particle masses. Atomic Dy, Rb and Cs spectroscopy measurements and the primordial helium abundance data allowed us to improve on existing constraints on the interactions of the scalar dark matter with the photon, electron, quarks and Higgs boson by up to 15 orders of magnitude. Limits on the interactions of the dark matter with W and Z bosons have been obtained for the first time. In addition to traditional methods to search for the variation of the fundamental constants (atomic clocks, quasar spectra, Big Bang Nucleosynthesis data) we discuss variations in phase shifts produced in laser/maser interferometers (such as giant LIGO, Virgo, GEO600 and TAMA300, used to detect gravitational waves and the table-top silicon cavity) and changes in pulsar rotational frequencies which may have been observed already in pulsar glitches. Other effects of dark matter and dark energy include apparent violation of the fundamental symmetries: oscillating or transient atomic electric dipole moments, precession of electron and nuclear spins about the direction of Earth’s motion through an axion field (the axion wind effect), and violation of Lorentz symmetry and Einstein equivalence principle. Finally, we explore a possibility to explain the DAMA collaboration claim of dark matter detection by the dark matter scattering on electrons. We have shown that the electron relativistic effects increase the ionization differential cross section up to 3 orders of magnitude.