Speaker: Hannah Banks
Searching for ultra-light dark matter with atomic & nuclear clocks and interferometers
Fundamental physics has come to somewhat of a crossroads. With the as-yet absence of new particles at high energy colliders it has become increasingly attractive to consider the possibility that the new physics we seek has remained hidden not by an inaccessible energy barrier but via incredibly weak couplings to the Standard Model. Emerging quantum sensing technologies have recently unlocked a number of tantalising avenues to probe new physics at this feebly interacting frontier. In this talk I will outline how atomic & nuclear clocks and interferometers offer a means to detect theories of ultra-light dark matter which cause fundamental constants to oscillate in time. I will then propose a new method for detecting scalar ultra-light dark matter – nuclear interferometry – and show that this may provide access to unchartered theoretical territory.