IQIM Postdoctoral and Graduate Student Seminar

Optical tweezers have proven to be a versatile tool in fields ranging from microscopy to precision measurement. Arthur Ashkin predicted early on that if the trap could be made sufficiently stable, then one could detect tiny changes to the gravitational force exerted on a levitated object. We report results from an improved version of such an experiment, designed to search for hypothetical new gravity-like forces at the  10 m range. Backgrounds have proven to be a formidable challenge to achieving comparable sensitivity to other experiments that largely employ variants of mechanical oscillators. By reducing the dominant source of background by & 100, we have excluded Yukawa modifications to the gravitational potential at the level of  106 times that of Newtonian gravity, at length scales of  10 m. In the process, we have also gleaned greater understanding of the dominant sources of background, and identified mitigation strategies. It is expected that these improvements can improve the sensitivity to equal or better than the state-of-the art, making this platform a complementary technology to mechanical oscillators subject to different systematic uncertainties.

Lunch will be provided following the talk.