  Cosmology and particle physics are closer today than ever before, with
several searches underway at the interface between cosmology, particle physics,
and field theory. The mystery of dark matter (DM) is one of the greatest common
unsolved problems between these fields. It is established now based on many
astrophysical and cosmological observations that only a small fraction of the
total matter content of the universe is made of baryonic matter, while the vast
majority is constituted by dark matter. However, the nature of such a component
is still unknown. One theoretically well-motivated approach to understanding
the nature of dark matter would be through looking for light pseudo-scalar
candidates for dark matter such as axions and axion-like particles (ALPs).
Axions are hypothetical elementary particles resulting from the Peccei-Quinn
(PQ) solution to the strong CP (charge-parity) problem in quantum
chromodynamics (QCD). Furthermore, many theoretically well-motivated extensions
to the standard model of particle physics (SMPP) predicted the existence of
more pseudo-scalar particles similar to the QCD axion and called ALPs. Axions
and ALPs are characterized by their coupling with two photons. While the
coupling parameter for axions is related to the axion mass, there is no direct
relation between the coupling parameter and the mass of ALPs. Nevertheless, it
is expected that ALPs share the same phenomenology of axions. In the past
years, axions and ALPs regained popularity and slowly became one of the most
appealing candidates that possibly contribute to the dark matter density of the
universe. In this thesis, we focus on studying the phenomenology of axions and
ALPs interactions with photons to constrain some of their properties.
