Presentation materials
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...
Next generation "sub-GeV" dark matter searches require new tools and techniques with much improved sensitivity. In particular, the constrained kinematic space of potential interactions suggests that collective excitations like phonons may be the only signature of very low mass dark matter candidates. One promising technology to study these are qubit derived superconducting charge-parity...
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....
The Princeton aXion Search (PXS) is a new experiment to search for QCD axion dark matter in the 0.8-2.1 ueV mass range (corresponding to 200-500 MHz frequency range). I describe development into all aspects of the experiment, including solenoidal magnet, cryogenics, amplifiers, and resonators. PXS leverages a strong partnership with the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) to build a 5T,...
