The Stalnaker Lab is an research group that uses atomic physics and precision measurement techniques to study fundamental physics questions.
The Global Network of Optical Magnetometers to search for Exotic Physics (GNOME)
The GNOME collaboration uses optical magnetometers based on alkali atoms and noble gases to search for candidates for dark matter and other exotic physics.
Astrophysical evidence suggests up to 80% of the matter in the universe is made up of something unlike anything that has been observed on Earth. One possibility is that dark matter is comprised of ultralight bosons that form large-scale cosmological structures. These dark matter fields can potentially interact with ordinary matter through a spin-dependent coupling. Such an interaction could be detected using optical magnetometers based on alkali atoms and noble gases placed in a magnetic shield. To ensure the dark matter is distinguishable from local perturbations we have a global network of magnetometers. A true dark matter event would result in correlated signals in the detectors throughout the network.
This work is supported by the National Science Foundation, Award Numbers: 1707803, 2110370, and 2510627.
The Search for Non-Interacting Particles Experiment (SNIPE)
The SNIPE hunt is a collaboration to look for evidence of dark matter in the form of dark photons or axion like particles. The search relies on the fact that the conductive ground of the Earth and the conductive ionosphere act as a transducer that can lead to the particles producing a measurable magnetic field that oscillates at a particular frequency and has a global pattern. Since the dark matter signature is magnetic, we can not conduct the experiment in magnetic shields. Instead, we place sensitive magnetometers in the wilderness, far from anthropogenic sources of magnetic noise.
This work is done in collaboration with Derek Jackson Kimball's group at Cal State - East Bay, Ibrahim Sulai's group at Bucknell University, Abaz Kryemadhi's group at Messaih University, and Dima Budker's group at the Helmoltz Institute in Mainz, Germany.
This work is supported by the National Science Foundation, Award Numbers: 1707803, 2110370, and 2510627.
Optical Frequency Comb Spectroscopy
Optical frequency combs are generated with lasers that produce ultra-short pulses of phase coherent light. This wave train produces approximately 400,000 different colors. The most significant feature of the optical frequency comb is that the different frequencies of the output light are separated from the neighboring frequencies by precisely the same amount. Thus, the frequency comb acts as a optical ruler for light and allows for the measurement of the frequency of light. If one knows the separation of the ticks of the ruler, one simply counts the number of ticks to determine the length of an object. Frequency combs solve the problem of measuring the frequency of light by simplifying it to a measurement of the small frequency difference between any two neighboring frequencies. The result is that optical frequency measurements are currently among the most precise measurements in all of science. We utilize the precision of frequency combs to perform precision spectroscopy.
This work is supported by the National Institute of Standards and Technology Precision Measurements Grant and the National Science Foundation, Award Number 1305591