Related papers: Probing Light Particles With Optically Trapped Sen…
The development of levitated optomechanics has enabled precise force sensors that operate in the quantum measurement regime, opening up unique opportunities to search for new physics whose weak interactions may have evaded existing sensors.…
We propose a search for low mass dark matter particles through momentum recoils caused by their scattering from trapped, nm-scale objects. Our projections show that even with a modest array of fg-mass sensors, parameter-space beyond the…
Significant effort has been devoted to searching for new fundamental forces of nature. At short length scales (below approximately 10 nm), the strongest experimental constraints come from neutron scattering from individual nuclei in gases.…
Celestial objects such as stars and planets might be able to capture a large amount of dark matter particles through dark matter-nucleon scattering. Many previous studies have considered different celestial objects such as the Sun and the…
Results are reported from a search for a class of composite dark matter models with feeble, long-range interactions with normal matter. We search for impulses arising from passing dark matter particles by monitoring the mechanical motion of…
We show that dark matter with a per-nucleon scattering cross section $\gtrsim 10^{-28}~{\rm cm^2}$ could be discovered by liquid scintillator neutrino detectors like BOREXINO, SNO+, and JUNO. Due to the large dark matter fluxes admitted,…
Dark matter particles gravitationally bound to our galaxy should exhibit a characteristic speed distribution limited by their escape velocity at the position of the Earth ($v_{esc}\simeq$ 550 km/s). An ongoing search for anomalous cosmic…
Levitated optomechanical systems are rapidly becoming leading tools for precision sensing of forces and accelerations acting on particles in the femtogram to nanogram mass range. These systems enable a high level of control over the…
What if the dark matter-nucleon scattering cross section is too small to be detected by direct detection experiments? It is well known in the literature that some interactions lead to dark matter-nucleon scattering cross sections that can…
Development of large mass detectors for low-energy neutrinos and dark matter may allow supernova detection via neutrino-nucleus elastic scattering. An elastic-scattering detector could observe a few, or more, events per ton for a galactic…
All attempts to directly detect particle dark matter (DM) scattering on nuclei suffer from the partial or total loss of sensitivity for DM masses in the GeV range or below. We derive novel constraints from the inevitable existence of a…
We calculate the scattering rate of sub-GeV dark matter in solid-state targets for spin-dependent dark matter -- nucleon interactions. For dark matter particles with mass below 100 MeV, the scattering occurs predominantly through incoherent…
Laser Light Scattering (LLS) method, combined with a long-distance microscope was utilized to detect micrometer-sized particles on a smooth substrate. LLS was capable to detect individual particle release, shrink, or fragmentation during…
Dark matter (DM) particles with mass in the sub-GeV range are an attractive alternative to heavier weakly-interacting massive particles, but direct detection of such light particles is challenging. If however DM-nucleus scattering leads to…
We propose an experiment using optically trapped and cooled dielectric microspheres for the detection of short-range forces. The center-of-mass motion of a microsphere trapped in vacuum can experience extremely low dissipation and quality…
We propose a new method to detect low-energy neutrinos and low-mass dark matter at or below the MeV scale, through their coherent scatterings from freely falling heavy atoms and the resulting kinematic shifts. We start with a simple…
The search for non-baryonic dark matter remains a key focus in modern physics, with the light pseudoscalar axion serving as a well-motivated candidate. Here, we present a laboratory-scale detection scheme to constrain axion-nucleon…
We demonstrate optical levitation of SiO$_2$ spheres with masses ranging from 0.1 to 30 nanograms. In high vacuum, we observe that the measured acceleration sensitivity improves for larger masses and obtain a sensitivity of $0.4 \times…
Exotic dark matter together with dark energy or cosmological constant seem to dominate in the Universe. An even higher density of such matter seems to be gravitationally trapped in our Galaxy. The nature of dark matter can be unveiled only,…
Metallic nano-objects play crucial roles in diverse fields, including biomedical imaging, nanomedicine, spectroscopy, and photocatalysis. Nano-objects with sizes that are less than 15 nm exhibit extremely low light scattering…