Speaker
Description
Optical tweezers have been at the forefront of technological advancement in levitated optomechanics and are still the only platform to cool spheres to the ground state of motion. However, they come with a major drawback of providing a back-action force that is difficult to reduce. Magnetic levitation offers an alternative that decouples the trapping from measurement allowing back-action free levitation. This technique could provide benefits when not detecting particle displacement with continuous weak measurement. Chip-based magnetic traps are a promising platform that allow for tighter trapping and the ability to scale up to arrays of traps. I will show the efforts of our group to levitate and control superconducting particles with these chip-based trap including inital work to scale to arrays of particles. I will also describe a scheme to measure the energy absorbed during a nuclear decay by the internal modes of a superconducting sphere levitated in a magnetic field. When the energy is absorbed, the subsequent increase in the temperature of the sphere will reduce its resonant frequency and alter its equilibrium position. By continuously tracking these properties, the energy deposited by a single nuclear decay can be measured. This could find uses in kinematic reconstruction of dark matter interactions or nuclear decays, characterisation of rare-isotopes and identification of the Mössbauer effect in new isotopes.