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Speaker: Dave Moore (Yale)-Title: Optomechanical sensors for nuclear and particle physics
April 13, 2023 @ 4:00 pm - 5:00 pm
This is an In-Person [HYBRID] Event
Date: April 13, 2023
Location: Sessler Conference Room- 50A-5132
Time: 4:00- 5:00 pm
Speaker: Dave Moore (Yale)
Title: Optomechanical sensors for nuclear and particle physics
Abstract: The development of optomechanical systems has revolutionized the detection of tiny forces over the past few decades. As such technologies reach (and surpass) quantum measurement limits, they can enable new searches for weakly coupled phenomena, including dark matter, gravitational waves, “fifth’’ forces, and sterile neutrinos. As a demonstration of these techniques, I will describe an initial search for dark matter using an optically levitated nanogram mass sensor, which can exceed the sensitivity of even large underground detectors for certain classes of dark matter candidates in a few days of exposure. If a signal were detected, such sensors would also be able to correlate its direction with earth’s motion through the galaxy, allowing definitive confirmation that such a signal arose from dark matter. The same techniques can also permit new laboratory searches for sterile neutrinos, potentially probing orders-of-magnitude smaller mixings with active neutrinos than previous experiments in the keV-MeV mass range. I will describe recent proposals to perform such searches using optically trapped nanoparticles doped with beta emitters.
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