Past Event: YCIU Inaugural Seminar Talk with David Moore

This event has passed.
- Past Event: Fri Feb 21, 2025 12:00 p.m.—1:00 p.m.
Title: Levitated mechanical quantum sensors for exploring the invisible universe
Abstract: The development of optomechanical systems—where the motion of a massive object is manipulated and measured using light—has revolutionized the detection of tiny forces over the past few decades. As these technologies approach quantum measurement limits, they can enable new laboratory searches for forces that may be exerted by messengers from the invisible universe, such as dark matter, neutrinos, or gravity. I will describe preliminary efforts in our lab toward using levitated micron-scale particles to detect the gravitational field of a massive particle placed in a spatially delocalized superposition. Such experiments have the potential to address fundamental questions about the nature of gravitational interactions, including whether gravity can generate entanglement between massive particles. While realizing such ambitious laboratory tests is a long-term goal of this work, I will also discuss how the techniques developed for these experiments can already enable novel searches for certain types of dark matter or other weakly coupled new phenomena that may have escaped detection in previous laboratory searches.