High Energy Physics Seminar

Note: Special time.

"Single-photon atom gradiometry is a powerful experimental technique that can be employed to hunt for scalar ultralight dark matter (ULDM) through the ULDM-induced oscillation of atomic transition energies. In particular, atom gradiometers would be especially powerful tools to explore the mid-frequency gap (i.e. 0.01 Hz - 10 Hz corresponding to masses between about 1e-16 eV and 1e-13 eV) in the ULDM frequency spectrum. While compact atom gradiometers, like AION-10, would be poised to probe small regions of parameter space that have not be excluded by other experiments, long-baseline atom gradiometers, like AION-100, MAGIS-100 and future km-long experiments, are expected to constrain much larger and unchartered portions of DM parameter space. In light of these experiments' extraordinary sensitivity to accelerations, the projected reach of km-baseline gradiometers in the sub-Hz regime is limited by seismically induced gravity gradient noise (GGN), which arises as a result of mass fluctuations around the experiment. In this talk, after reviewing the basics of atom interferometry for ULDM searches, I will show that, in certain geological settings, GGN can be significantly mitigated when operating a multi-gradiometer configuration, which consists of three or more atom interferometers in the same baseline. As a result of this innovative configuration, which gives rise to non-trivial correlations between pairs of atom interferometers, it will be possible to recover large parts of ULDM parameter space. "The talk is in 469 Lauritsen.

Contact [email protected] for Zoom link