Speaker
Description
Optically levitated quantum sensors have recently been increasingly popular in proposals to detect ultralight dark matter and gravitational waves due to their world-leading sensitivities to forces. Although historically less optimized to search for many DM couplings than e.g. magnetic traps, optical traps can reach much higher frequencies (kHz-to-GHz). After outlining the necessary concepts in optomechanical quantum sensing, we compare sensitivities to ultralight dark matter couplings with currently used optical traps versus a newly proposed optimised setup, improving these sensitivities by several orders of magnitude and reaching new dark matter parameter space. We also discuss near-future prospects of improving this by reaching the on-resonance standard quantum limit to explore the ultimate sensitivity of these novel detectors.
