Vejleder: Mads Toudal Frandsen
Projektbeskrivelse
Breakthroughs in fundamental physics have long been driven by theoretical insights from high energy physics and cosmology followed by very costly high energy searches. In this project we will look at a different route to probing new forces in nature via high precision low energy experiments such as those in the cold atoms lab here at SDU.
If a new force in nature, beyond the 4 known today exists, it will be mediated by a new force carrier X. This force carrier may well be light, below the GeV scale, as compared to the ca. 100 GeV mass Z-boson, the electroweak force carrier. Such a new force has been studied as a solution to several current problems in particle physics. The anomalous magnetic moment of the muon (through the mixing of X with the SM photon] is one such problem. The DM cusp-core problem, i.e. the observed small-scale low density cores of dark matter in the centers of galaxies and galaxy clusters, as compared to the higher density ’cusps’ expected from N-body simulations is another, where DM scatterings via X exchange would explain these low densities. The X particle will also affect atomic transitions because, on general grounds, it will couple to electrons and neutrons. As X is also light, the effects can be measured in precision spectroscopy experiments. In this project we will use classical and quantum field theory to describe the new force and X-particle and then we will study the effects on such atomic transitions and whether we can probe them in the SDU quantum optics lab.