Particle Physics Seminar: New era in dark matter searches, the dawn of the (nuclear) clock

Abstract:

After a brief introduction related to ultralight (pseudo) scalar dark matter, we are going to describe the current status of searches for ultralight dark matter (UDM). We explain why modern clocks can be used to search for both scalar and axion dark matter fields. We review existing and new types of well-motivated models of UDM and argue that they all share one key ingredient - their dominant coupling is to the QCD/nuclear sector, which existing clocks are less sensitive to (although there are a few ways to circumvent this challenge). We then focus on nuclear clocks to show why they might improve our sensitivity to DM searches by 8-10 orders of magnitude in the near future, and discuss some of the implications.

Seminar Organizer: Dr. Michael Geller