Dalziel Wilson is an associate professor at the University of Arizona Wyant College of Optical Sciences, where he holds the Murray Sargent III Endowed Chair in Quantum Optics. His work in cavity optomechanics includes demonstrations of radiation pressure feedback cooling, quantum-limited position measurement, optomechanical light squeezing, and ultrahigh-Q nanomechanics. Previously, he was a visiting scientist at IBM Research–Zurich and a Marie Curie postdoctoral fellow at EPFL. He received his Ph.D. from Caltech in 2012 and his B.S. from UC Berkeley in 2006.
Presentation Title:
Cavity optomechanical dark matter detectors: A pathfinder experiment
Presentation Abstract:
Advances in cooling and probing of solid-state mechanical oscillators using optical cavities have spurred widespread interest in using cavity optomechanical systems as tabletop dark matter detectors [1]. I’ll describe a demonstration experiment in which a cryogenically cooled silicon nitride membrane is used to search for coherently oscillating force fields produced by ultralight dark photon dark matter [2,3]. I’ll also discuss progress toward building a quantum-enhanced array of such detectors by integrating them into a distributed squeezed-light network [4,5].
[1] Carney, et. al. “Mechanical quantum sensing in the search for dark matter.” QSIT (2021)
[2] Manley et. al. “Searching for vector dark matter with an optomechanical accelerometer.” Phys. Rev. Lett. (2021).
[3] Chowdhury et al. “Optomechanical accelerometer search for ultralight dark matter.” Phys. Rev. D (2026).
[4] Xia et al. “Entanglement-enhanced optomechanical sensing.” Nat. Phot. (2023)
[5] Brady et al. “Entanglement-enhanced optomechanical sensor array with application to dark matter searches.” Comm. Phys. (2023)