Special Physics Seminar

Forging a model-independent path to the dark sector using rare-isotope-doped superconductors

Kyle Leach

Department of Physics
Colorado School of Mines

The development of the Standard Model (SM) has been one of the crowning achievements in modern physics and is the cornerstone of current subatomic studies. Despite its success, the SM is known to be incomplete in several areas (dark matter, dark energy, gravity, etc.) and broken in others. Perhaps the most promising venue for understanding how and why the SM fails is by examining the only known place the SM has been broken: non-zero neutrino masses (Nobel Prize 2015). This “neutrino window” into physics Beyond the Standard Model (BSM) is one of the highest impact topics in all of science given its prospects for understanding why our Universe contains matter, why time has an arrow, and why most of the mass in our Universe “dark”. My group tackles these big open questions by embedding short-lived radioisotopes in superconducting tunnel junctions (STJs) to precisely measure the eV-scale recoiling atom produced during nuclear beta decay. Since these recoils are encoded with the fundamental quantum information of the decay process, they carry signatures of BSM particles and interactions which are inaccessible or invisible to high-energy colliders or monolithic detectors, and provides a unique, complimentary, and model independent portal to the dark sector. Over the past 5 years we have pioneered this field of research, and in this talk I will discuss the broad program we have developed to provide some of the world's leading limits on BSM physics, as well as the technological advances across several sub-disciplines of science that have been required to achieve this. As this field is still in its early stages, I will also give a snapshot of where I think we are headed and the future applications of this approach.