Quantum Sensors for the Hidden Sector

The hidden sector means ultra-light particles that Physicists might have missed in the rush to detect all the heavy ones! In this talk I'll explain the possible importance of the hidden sector - why there might in fact be lots of light particles that haven't been detected in accelerators, how we go about trying to detect them, and other interesting things we can do with the detectors that we build. What all this has to do with astronomy is that the axion is an example of a hidden sector particle, and axions make a good dark matter candidate, but I hope to convince you that even if axions don't exist the science of axion detectors is interesting in its own right.

Professor Ed Daw specializes in ultra-sensitive experiments searching for the signatures of hypothesized and potentially critical signals in the field of particle astrophysics. In particular, searches for WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles), gravitational waves, and axions