理论物理所

Talks

Location: Home>Activities>Talks

Using Cold Atoms to look for the Biggest Bangs since the Big Bang

07/20 2023 Colloquium
  • Title Using Cold Atoms to look for the Biggest Bangs since the Big Bang
  • Speaker John Ellis (CERN)
  • Date 15:30 Jul. 20, 2023
  • Venue Room 322, ITP North Building
    • Abstract
    Atom interferometry (AI) is a promising quantum technology to search for ultralight dark matter (ULDM) and gravitational waves (GWs) beyond the reaches of other detectors. Focusing on the capabilities of the planned AION experiments, I will summarise recent studies of prospective AI sensitivities to ULDM and GWs. The NANOGrav and other pulsar timing arrays (PTAs) have recently presented evidence for GWs with frequencies in the nanoHz range. I will discuss their possible origins and the prospects for AI and other experiments to observe the range of GW frequencies between the PTAs and LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA, and detect the mergers of supermassive black holes, networks of cosmic strings or cosmological phase transitions.

    About the speaker:
    John Ellis is a theoretical physicist who has held the Clerk Maxwell Professorship of Theoretical Physics at King's College in London since 2010. After obtaining a PhD from Cambridge University and holding post-doctoral positions at SLAC and Caltech, from 1973 to 2011 he worked at CERN (Geneva), where he was Theory Division Leader for six years.  His research interests focus on the phenomenological aspects of elementary particle physics and its connections with astrophysics, cosmology and gravity. Much of his work relates directly to experiment: interpreting results of searches for new particles and exploring the physics that could be done with future accelerators. A proposal he made in 1976 led to the discovery of the gluon in 1979, and he was one of the first to study how the Higgs boson could be produced and discovered.  He has authored over a thousand scientific papers, with over eighty thousand citations in total.