Construction and Commissioning of the ABRACADABRA-10\,cm Prototype: Lessons for Future Experiments

The evidence for the existence of Dark Matter is well supported by many cosmological observations. Separately, long standing problems within the Standard Model point to new weakly interacting particles to help explain away unnatural fine-tunings. The axion was originally proposed to explain the Strong-CP problem, but was subsequently shown to be a strong candidate for explaining the Dark Matter abundance of the Universe. ABRACADABRA is an experimental program to search for ultralight axion Dark Matter, with a focus on the mass range $10^{-14} \lesssim m_a \lesssim 10^{-6}$\,eV. We search for these axions and other axion like particles (ALPs) through a modification to Maxwell's equations, which cause strong magnetic fields to source weak oscillating electrical currents parallel to the field. In this talk, I will describe the construction and commissioning of the ABRACADABRA-10\,cm prototype, which released first results last October. I will summarize the important lessons learned and their application towards a future meter scale version of the detector which seeks to be some 9 orders of magnitude more sensitive.