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Accurately observing the rarefied media of the upper atmosphere, exosphere, and planetary and solar system environments and beyond requires highly sensitive metrological techniques. We present the operating concept and architecture of an…
Optically levitated macroscopic objects are a powerful tool in the field of force sensing, owing to high sensitivity, absolute force calibration, environmental isolation and the advanced degree of control over their dynamics that have been…
Intensity interferometry removes the stringent requirements on mechanical precision and atmospheric corrections that plague all amplitude interferometry techniques at the cost of severely limited sensitivity. A new idea we recently…
Nanomechanical resonators are widely operated as force and mass sensors with sensitivities in the zepto-Newton and yocto-gram regime, respectively. Their accuracy, however, is usually undermined by high uncertainties in the effective mass…
Many optical measurement techniques, such as light scattering from wavelength-scale particles or detecting motion from a surface with an optical lever, encode information in a complex radiation pattern. Extracting all available information…
Optically levitated nanoparticles in vacuum provide a highly sensitive platform for probing weak light-matter interactions. In this work, we present an interference-based method to amplify the optical force exerted by a weak field on a…
Light-pulse atom interferometers rely on the wave nature of matter and its manipulation with coherent laser pulses. They are used for precise gravimetry and inertial sensing as well as for accurate measurements of fundamental constants.…
We review recent works on optomechanics of optically trapped microspheres and nanoparticles in vacuum, which provide an ideal system for studying macroscopic quantum mechanics and ultrasensitive force detection. An optically trapped…
The optical interferometry has been widely used in various high precision applications. Usually, the minimum precision of an interferometry is limited by various technique noises in practice. To suppress such kind of noises, we propose a…
We demonstrate a technique to estimate the strength of non-linearities present in the trapping potential of an optically levitated nanoparticle. By applying a brief pulsed reduction in trapping laser power of the system such as to squeeze…
Fast detection and characterization of single nanoparticles such as viruses, airborne aerosols and colloidal particles are considered to be particularly important for medical applications, material science and atmospheric physics. In…
Optical beam deflection is a popular method to measure the deformation of micromechanical devices. As it measures mostly a local slope, its sensitivity depends on the location and size of the optical spot. We present a method to evaluate…
Miniaturized mechanical resonators have proven to be excellent force sensors. However, they usually rely on resonant sensing schemes, and their excellent performance cannot be utilized for the detection of static forces. Here, we report on…
We experimentally squeeze the thermal motional state of an optically levitated nanosphere, by fast switching between two trapping frequencies. The measured phase space distribution of our particle shows the typical shape of a squeezed…
We investigate experimentally the dynamics of a non-spherical levitated nanoparticle in vacuum. In addition to translation and rotation motion, we observe the light torque-induced precession and nutation of the trapped particle. We provide…
The symmetron, one of the light scalar fields introduced by dark energy theories, is thought to modify the gravitational force when it couples to matter. However, detecting the symmetron field is challenging due to its screening behavior in…
Increasing the laser power is essential to improve the sensitivity of interferometric gravitational wave detectors. However, optomechanical parametric instabilities can set a limit to that power. It is of major importance to understand and…
We propose and theoretically analyze an experiment where displacement sensing of an optically levitated nanoparticle in front of a surface can be used to measure the induced dipole-dipole interaction between the nanoparticle and its thermal…
Performing interferometry in an optical lattice formed by standing waves of light offers potential advantages over its free-space equivalents since the atoms can be confined and manipulated by the optical potential. We demonstrate such an…
Oscillators based on levitated particles are promising for the development of ultrasensitive force detectors. The theoretical performance of levitated nanomechanical sensors is usually characterized by the so-called thermal noise limit…