Title: "A New Approach to Gauge Fields in Curved Backgrounds"

Abstract: What constitutes the dark matter? As the hunt for a direct detection continues, theories abound. An intriguing proposal is due to Sikivie & Yang, who suggest that the dark matter is made up of a hypothetical particle called the axion, and in their picture the axionic dark matter forms an exotic type of gas known as a Bose-Einstein condensate. In this talk, I will discuss efforts to understand the Sikivie-Yang proposal, one of which spurred the development of a new framework for studying the Hamiltonian dynamics of gauge theories in curved spaces.