New Windows on Fundamental Physics: from tabletop devices to large scale detectors

Session

One-DAY UK-APP Meeting Morning II

19 Jan 2026, 11:30

Jocelyn Bell Burnell Lecture Theatre (University of Manchester)

Conveners

One-DAY UK-APP Meeting Morning II

• Jamie McDonald (University of Manchester)

18. Searching for Ultralight Dark Matter with MOLeQuTE: a Massive Optically Levitated Quantum Tabletop Experiment

Louis Hamaide (Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz)

19/01/2026, 11:30

Talk (UK-APP one-day meeting)

Many well theoretically motivated models of ultralight dark matter are expected to give rise to feeble oscillatory forces on macroscopic objects. Optically trapped sensors have high force sensitivies but have remained relatively unexplored in this context. In this talk we propose a new, tunable, optically trapped sensor specifically designed to detect such forces. Our design features a...

13. Detection of Ultralight Dark Matter Bosenovae with Quantum Sensors

Jason Arakawa (University of Delaware)

19/01/2026, 12:00

Talk (UK-APP one-day meeting)

In a broad class of theories, the accumulation of ultralight dark matter (ULDM) with particles of mass $10^{-22}~\textrm{eV} < m_{\phi} < 1~\textrm{eV}$ leads to the formation of long-lived bound states known as boson stars. When the ULDM exhibits self-interactions, prodigious bursts of energy carried by relativistic bosons are released from collapsing boson stars in bosenova explosions. We...