Gadi Afek (Yale University) Daniel Carney (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory), and David C. Moore (Yale University) sat down with the Physical Review Journal Club to discuss their method to detect dark matter with levitated spheres.
The detector works by measuring the momentum imparted when dark matter particles scatter off optically trapped nanometer-scale spheres. This approach provides an entirely new way to search for light dark matter particles with masses down to fractions of the mass of an electron. The research was recently outlined in their paper from Physical Review Letters titled: "Coherent Scattering of Low Mass Dark Matter from Optically Trapped Sensors."
Afek and colleagues presented their data then answered all participant questions in a session moderated by Raphael Lang, Purdue University.