BIOGRAPHY:

Prof. Dr. Morgan Mitchell ICREA Professor at ICFO – The Institute of Photonic Sciences. He obtained his PhD in Physics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1999, and has led the Atomic Quantum Optics research group at ICFO since 2004. His research interests include atomic sensors for biomedical and chemical physics research, tabletop searches for physics beyond the Standard Model, quantum random number generation, and experimental studies of quantum nonlocality. He teaches quantum optics and quantum sensing in Barcelona.  

LECTURE: "Atomic quantum sensors in searches for dark matter and new physics"

Arguably the greatest mystery in physics today is the nature of so-called “dark matter,” matter that is inferred from the rotation rates of galaxies and other astrophysical observables, but is not directly seen. Dark matter is estimated to be 80 percent of the total mass of the universe, meaning that we are ignorant of most of what the universe contains. Dark matter must interact very weakly with light and ordinary matter, otherwise we would see it, and its existence shows that there is new physics yet to be discovered – the Standard Model of particle physics does not contain anything that behaves like dark matter. One way to “look” for dark matter is to atomic/optical instruments known as comagnetometers, which are sensitive to new forces predicted by some dark matter models. Remarkably, these atomic instruments are small, simple and low-power, quite the opposite of the giant particle accelerators and immensely complex particle detectors that until now have been used to discover new physics. I will try to explain how these instruments work, and what they can tell us, using a minimum of particle physics.