Speaker
Description
Recent calculations have demonstrated that we may attempt the direct detection of dark matter in the laboratory through gravitational interaction alone. This is in particular relevant around the well-motivated Planck mass scale (10^19 GeV or 22 micro-gram). The Windchime collaboration is working towards a large array of dedicated sensors, based on MEMS accelerometers. Paired with quantum-enhanced readout including squeezed light sources and quantum back-action evasion, such an experiment may ultimately realize this exciting sensitivity. In the meantime, searches for ultra-light (<10^-10 eV) dark matter candidates provide an interesting application of our detector prototypes. In this talk, I will present the idea of Windchime, our prototype setups, as well as recent developments of sensors, quantum readout, simulations, and analysis frameworks.
