Colloquium
Physics Lecture Hall
Wednesday, December 3, 2014, 4:45 pm
Tea and cookies @ 4:30 pm
Andi Geraci
(University of Nevada Reno):
Hunting for axions and new short-range forces with resonant sensors
High-Q resonant sensors enable ultra-sensitive force and field detection. In this talk I will describe two applications of these sensors in searches for new physics. First I will discuss an experiment which uses laser-cooled optically trapped silica microspheres to search for violations of the gravitational inverse square law at micron distances. Next I will describe a new method based on nuclear magnetic resonance which can detect short-range spin-dependent forces from axion-like particles. The method can potentially improve previous experimental bounds by several orders of magnitude and can probe deep into the theoretically interesting regime for the QCD axion.
A.Geraci, S. Papp, and J. Kitching, Phys. Rev. Lett. 105, 101101 (2010). A. Arvanitaki and A. Geraci, Phys. Rev. Lett. 113, 161801 (2014).