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

Superconductor vortices imaged by NV ensembles in diamonds

We present a novel wide-field imaging technique to image vortices in type-II superconductors. We acquire the images using ensembles of NV centers in diamond. By using microfabricated diamond plates we reduce the superconductor-NV distance to less than one µm, which allowed us to study the stray magnetic field of vortices in a Type-II superconductor. https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.01957 Caption:  Vortices in a type-II superconductor, […]

Low-energy tests of fundamental physics, a review

Why is it interesting and important to test fundamental laws and search for undiscovered particles using laboratory-based techniques? Such room-scale experiments are already spearheading discovery, and can be expected to become even more important as accelerators reach seemingly inevitable limits. A personal perspective of Dmitry Budker. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1062798717000795   Caption:  Group meeting, where personal perspectives are often […]

Shooting a laser into the sky and picking up the light of excited sodium atoms

We demonstrate a method of remote magnetic field measurements in the mesosphere using a laser beam with intensity modulation at the Larmor frequency of sodium, achieving an accuracy of 0.28 mG/√ Hz. This is useful as a laser guide star bright enhancement method and as a remote sensing device for magnetic fields in the mesosphere. https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.04686 Nature […]

Isotope shift, non-linearity of King plot and search for nuclear island of stability and new particles

In a joint work of Anna Viatkina, Victor Flambaum and Amy Geddes, a single-particle relativistic formula found to estimate the isotope shift (IS) in many-electron atoms. It is used to predict the behavior of IS in superheavy atoms. They further analyse different contributions to the non-linearity of King plot arising from Standard Model. Their estimates […]