Speaker
Description
Advances in cooling and probing of solid-state mechanical oscillators using optical cavities have spurred widespread interest in using cavity optomechanical systems as tabletop dark matter detectors [1]. I'll describe a demonstration experiment in which a cryogenically cooled silicon nitride membrane is used to search for coherently oscillating force fields produced by ultralight dark photon dark matter [2,3]. I'll also discuss progress towards building a quantum-enhanced array of such detectors by integrating them into a distributed squeezed-light network [4,5].
[1] Carney, et. al. "Mechanical quantum sensing in the search for dark matter." QSIT (2021). [2] Manley et. al. "Searching for vector dark matter with an optomechanical accelerometer." Phys. Rev. Lett. (2021). [3] Chowdhury et al. "Optomechanical accelerometer search for ultralight dark matter." Phys. Rev. D (2026). [4] Xia et al. "Entanglement-enhanced optomechanical sensing." Nat. Phot. (2023). [5] Brady et al. "Entanglement-enhanced optomechanical sensor array with application to dark matter searches." Comm. Phys. (2023).