Searching for dark fields with atom interferometry (Prof. P. Hamilton)

  • Attention! Friday Colloquium
  • Date: Dec 9, 2016
  • Time: 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Prof. Dr. Paul Hamilton
  • UCLA Physics & Astronomy, Los Angeles, USA
  • Room: Herbert Walther Lecture Hall
  • Host: MPQ
One of the great mysteries of modern physics is the identity of nearly 95% of our Universe, which has been labelled as dark matter and dark energy. The high precision of atom interferometry gives a new way to explore this mystery.

If quantum fields are responsible for dark matter or dark energy their interactions with normal matter can lead to new forces. Matter wave interferometry uses atoms as nearly ideal test masses to measure accelerations with sensitivities so high that we can now detect forces as weak as the gravitational pull of a centimeter scale mass. In this talk I will discuss a proof-of-principle experiment at Berkeley which improved constraints on "chameleon" dark energy theories by several orders of magnitude. Further improvements could discover or rule out several types of dark energy models. I will also discuss techniques being developed at UCLA which will allow us to detect the interference of trapped atoms in real time giving a new tool for searching for oscillating forces from dark matter.

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