Nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers are probed all around the world on a daily basis. Here, in collaboration with a group of researches in the University of Latvia, we probe them as well, but first we turn on a magnetic field around them. Not any magnetic field, but such a field at which the hyperfine energy levels […]
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Advances Engineering magazine reports our gradiometer work
https://journals.aps.org/prapplied/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevApplied.11.024005 https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.02743
Isotopic variation of parity violation in atomic ytterbium
By observing the weak force’s effect in atomic ytterbium, and its dependence on isotopes of ytterbium, we find the prediction of Standard model to triumph once again. Nature physics ArXiv Press release Figure 3a in the article shows the magnitude of weak force effect (parity violation) in atomic ytterbium, as a function of ytterbium’s isotope. Standard model predicts […]
Dr. Derek Kimball is selected Fellow of the American Physical Society
Dr. Derek Kimball, HIM Visiting Scientist, the Scientific Coordinator of CAPER and GNOME, and a good friend, was selected Fellow of the American Physical Society.
A liquid of identical molecules as first-of-its-kind comagnetometer
Researchers from the Helmholtz Institute Mainz built a comagnetometer based on an ensemble of identical molecules. Thus the problem is: you need two magnetic field measurements to look for tiny effects, but when you use two different molecules to interact with the magnetic fields, the molecules tend to end up in different places (at least […]
Our Postdoc receives the 2018 Bragg Gold Medal
Yevgeny Stadnik, a Humboldt Fellow in our group, earns the Australian Institute of Physics’ 2018 Bragg Gold Medal for his PhD thesis [1,2], “Manifestations of Dark Matter and Variations of the Fundamental Constants of Nature in Atoms and Astrophysical Phenomena”. Caption: Yevgeny Stadnik in color.
Search for new physics with atoms and molecules – a review
How to use atoms and molecules to test fundamental physics? The paper reviews the literature on this topic. The tests include: * parity violation * searches for permanent electric dipole moments * tests of the CPT theorem and Lorentz symmetry * searches for variation of fundamental constants * tests of quantum electrodynamics * tests of general relativity […]
Atomic beam in an intense standing-wave field: How to avoid distortion of spectral lines?
We eliminate lineshape asymmetry in weak atomic transitions driven by an intense standing-wave field. https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.05884 We like our spectral line symmetric. Or at least, we would like to understand why it is not and correct for such unwanted effects when needed. This is exactly what we do here for the 408-nm transition in our Yb atomic beam. […]
How to look for axions better when shining lights through walls?
It may look crazy to an outside observer, but physicists nowadays shine a light on a wall and expect to see something behind it. We propose to modify such light-shining-through-walls experiments in a way that some of the light will be allowed to go beyond the wall, i.e. the wall is not completely opaque. Then, […]
High magnetic fields for fundamental physics – a review
How experiments use large magnetic fields (bigger than 30 Tesla) to search for new particles and fundamental physics in table-top experiments? Various experimental concepts and techniques are discussed, together with current and proposed experiments. https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.07547 Caption: The proposed scaled down, fully functional initial-demonstration version of International Axion Observatory (IAXO). Source: http://iaxo.web.cern.ch/content/home-international-axion-observatory