Recent advances in levitated optomechanics have enabled the detection of tiny forces through precise control of microscopic objects in vacuum. These technologies present new experimental platforms to probe weakly coupled phenomena in particle and nuclear physics. I will describe a dark matter search based on optically trapped, femtogram-scale silica nanospheres. In ultra-high vacuum, the...
We explore how recent advancements in the manipulation of single ionic wave packets open new avenues for detecting weak magnetic fields sourced by ultralight dark matter. By leveraging the entanglement between the ion's spin and motional degrees of freedom, proposed trapped-ion matter-wave interferometers enable the measurement of the Aharonov-Bohm phase accumulated by the ion over its...
The age of WIMP-like dark matter direct detection is drawing to a close due to their non-detection at exquisitely sensitive liquid-noble detectors. However, models where the dark matter is lighter than the mass of a proton remain largely inaccessible to existing probes. Recently, molecular targets have emerged as particularly well-suited detector materials to look for this sub-GeV dark matter....
Dual-phase liquid xenon TPCs have the potential to discover sub-GeV dark matter. In this low-energy regime, the limiting background is due to the instrument itself in the form of delayed electron and photon emission. In this talk, we present new data explaining the mechanism for delayed emission. Furthermore, we describe steps towards a prototype xenon TPC with significantly reduced delayed...
