Top dark matter scientist to speak at the University of Melbourne

One of Australia’s leading quantum technologies and dark matter scientists will deliver a talk at the University of Melbourne

Professor Mike Tobar will speak on: ‘Precision Metrology with Photons, Phonons and Spins: Answering Major Unsolved Problems in Physics and Advancing Translational Science’ on Thursday, April 7.

Professor Tobar leads the Quantum Technologies and Dark Matter Research Laboratory at the University of Western Australia (qdmlab.com). The lab is part of two nation-wide Australian Research Council Centres of Excellence, the Centre for Engineered Quantum Systems and the Centre for Dark Matter Particle Physics.

The Quantum Technologies and Dark Matter research laboratory has a rich history of developing precision tools for both fundamental physics and industrial applications.

This includes the development and application of novel low-loss and highly sensitive resonant photonic and phononic cavities, such as whispering gallery and re-entrant cavities, as well as photonic band gap and bulk acoustic wave structures.

These cavities have been used in a range of applications, including highly stable low noise classical and atomic oscillators, low noise measurement systems, highly sensitivity displacement sensors, high precision electron spin resonance and spin-wave spectroscopy, high precision measurement of material properties and applications of low-loss quantum hybrid systems, which are strongly coupled to form polaritons or quasi-particles.

Translational applications of the laboratory’s technology has included the realisation of the lowest noise oscillators and systems for advance radar, the enabling of high accuracy atomic clocks and ultra-sensitive transducers for precision gravity measurements.

Meanwhile, there is currently a world-wide renascence to adapt precision and quantum measurement techniques to major unsolved problems in physics.

This includes the effort to discover “Beyond Standard Model” physics, including the nature of Dark Matter, Dark Energy and the unification of Quantum Mechanics with General Relativity to discover the unified theory of everything.

Thus, the aforementioned technology has been adapted to realise precision measurement tools and techniques to test some of these core aspects of fundamental physics, such as searches for Lorentz invariance violations in the photon, phonon and gravity sectors, possible variations in fundamental constants, searches for wave-like dark matter and test of quantum gravity.

This work includes: 1) The laboratory’s study and application of putative modified physical equations due to beyond standard model physics, to determine possible new experiments: 2) An overview of its current experimental program, including status and future directions.

This includes experiments that take advantage of axion-photon coupling and axionspin coupling to search for axion dark matter.

Details on the talk are available on the Centre’s events page.