Mechanical Engineering Friday Seminar
Seminar Speaker: Prof. Andrew Geraci
Ultra-sensitive force detection with laser-cooled levitated sensors
In high-vacuum, optically trapped and cooled dielectric microspheres show great promise as force sensors -- the environmental decoupling of their center-of-mass motion enables sub-attonewton sensitivity (10-18N.) Hence they can be used for investigations of gravitational forces at short-range. I will discuss our progress towards using such sensors to search for Yukawa-type violations of the gravitational inverse square law at the micron length scale. We have constructed an apparatus to trap and cool silica microspheres in a combined dipole-optical cavity trap. By trapping a sphere in an antinode close to an end-mirror of the cavity, non-Newtonian gravity-like forces can be measured by monitoring the displacement of the sphere as a mass is brought behind the cavity mirror. Finally I will briefly discuss how similar techniques could be used for gravitational wave detection at high frequencies.
Andrew Geraci is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Nevada, Reno. Dr. Geraci completed his undergraduate work at the University of Chicago (A.B. Physics, 1998). He received his Ph.D. in physics at Stanford University in 2007. His dissertation was entitled, “Developments in the search for non-Newtonian gravity below the 25 micron length scale”. Before coming to UNR, he was a postdoctoral researcher (2007-2010) at NIST in Boulder, CO, where he worked on interfacing cold atoms with mechanical resonators.
Friday, September 19, 2014 at 10:00 am
Davidson Math and Science Center, DMS104
1055 Evans Avenue, Reno, NV 89512, USA
- Event Type
- Departments
- Pricing
Recent Activity
No recent activity