How big is your tabletop?

by Prof. Dmitry Budker

UC Berkeley / Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz

at Physics Colloquium

Tue, 06 Feb 2024, 15:15
Zoom only

Abstract

We will begin with some general remarks on the open questions in fundamental physics and how we go about addressing them. One approach is to search for “new” particles and forces beyond the ones in the standard model. Curiously, this can be successfully done with complementary approaches, all of them “table-top physics”, at least in spirit, with the characteristic size of the corresponding “table-top” ranging from nanometers (color centers in diamond) to several kilometers (the large collider at CERN) to the universe as a whole, with everything in between.

We will then focus on the “elephant-in-the-room” dark matter problem with a specific case of so-called ultralight scalar dark matter. It turns out, this kind of dark matter can be searched for with atomic and molecular spectroscopy.

Background ultralight scalar fields that are considered as a viable candidate for galactic dark matter may manifest themselves in apparent variation of fundamental constants, see, for example, [1,2].

In this talk, we will discuss some of the recent work of our group and collaborators, for example [3-6], where we search for oscillating dark matter with Compton frequencies from near DC up to above 100 MHz.

References

[1] A Arvanitaki, J Huang, and K Van Tilburg, “Searching for dilaton dark matter with atomic clocks,” Phys. Rev. D 91, 015015, 2015

[2] D Antypas, D Budker, VV Flambaum, MG Kozlov, G Perez, and J Ye, “Fast apparent oscillations of fundamental constants,” ANNALEN DER PHYSIK 2020, 1900566; arXiv:1912.01335

[3] A Banerjee, D Budker, M Filzinger, N Huntemann, G Paz, G Perez, S Porsev, and M Safronova, “Oscillating nuclear charge radii as sensors for ultralight dark matter,” arXiv:2301.10784 (2023)

[4] I.M. Bloch, D. Budker, V.V. Flambaum, I.B. Samsonov, A.O. Sushkov, and O. Tretiak, “Scalar dark matter induced oscillation of permanent-magnet field,” Phys. Rev. D 107, 075033 (2023), arXiv:2301.08514

[5] X Zhang, A Banerjee, M Leyser, G Perez, S Schiller, D Budker, and D Antypas, “Search for ultralight dark matter with spectroscopy of radio-frequency atomic transitions,” arXiv:2212.04413 (2022)

[6] O Tretiak, X Zhang, NL Figueroa, D Antypas, A Brogna, A Banerjee, G Perez, and D Budker, “Improved bounds on ultralight scalar dark matter in the radio-frequency range,” Phys. Rev. Lett. 129, 031301 (2022); arXiv:2201.02042

Created on 08-01-2024 by Maniv, Eran (eranmaniv)
Updaded on 23-01-2024 by Maniv, Eran (eranmaniv)