He became Senior Fellow at CERN from 1979 to 1981 and assistant professor at University of Florida from 1981 to 1984.

[8] Sikivie played a crucial role in the development of the Axion Dark Matter eXperiment (ADMX).

He collaborated with his colleagues, Neil S. Sullivan and David B. Tanner, at University of Florida and developed the experimental details of ADMX.

Wise, F. Wilczek, L. F. Abbott, M. Dine, and W. Fischler, discovered that cosmic axions created from mis-alignment mechanism can be a substantial fraction of Dark Matter.

Later Sikivie laid the theoretical ground for dark matter axion detections such as the ADMX.