SPEAKER: Dan Carney (LBNL) – TITLE: The End of Measurement and The Last Lab

This is an In-Person Event

Location: Sessler Conference Room- 50A-5132

Title: The End of Measurement and The Last Lab

Abstract: I will give a breezy overview–designed to be provocative and hopefully enjoyable–of the way quantum mechanical noise enters a number of “holy grail” experimental targets in HEP. The recent theoretical observation that PTOLEMY as designed cannot actually detect relic neutrinos, due to Heisenberg uncertainty in the tritium target, will serve as an opening cautionary tale. I will then explain how one could in principle circumvent this problem, and use this as a springboard to discuss a few other possible experiments: measurement of the neutrino mass using a PTOLEMY-esque scheme, detection of “single gravitons” and/or gravitational entanglement, and finally the direct detection of ultraheavy dark matter purely through its gravitational interaction.
These examples are chosen to motivate the core idea: the fundamental limits imposed by quantum mechanical noise are still broadly unknown, and a great deal of work is still needed to both identify these limits theoretically and engineer devices that can approach them.

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