Nuclear recoil detection with levitated mechanical quantum sensors

by David Moore (Yale University)

Tuesday 29 Jul 2025, 11:00 → 13:00 US/Eastern

Many of the open questions in fundamental physics involve particles or interactions that couple extremely weakly to laboratory sensors. Determining the properties of these “invisible” constituents of the universe, such as dark matter and neutrinos, may require detectors that employ quantum systems themselves as sensors to detect the small momentum or energy transfers imparted when these particles interact. In this talk I will describe techniques to measure the tiny forces imparted by individual sub-atomic particles using optically trapped nano- and microparticles in vacuum, whose motion can be read out in the quantum regime. Such sensors have already been used to detect the forces imparted by single nuclear decays inside the particles, and ongoing work aims to open a broad set of applications for neutrino physics and dark matter searches with this new class of sensors.