Bulletin of the American Physical Society
APS April Meeting 2016
Volume 61, Number 6
Saturday–Tuesday, April 16–19, 2016; Salt Lake City, Utah
Session S15: Laboratory Tests of GravitationUndergraduate Students
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Sponsoring Units: GGR DAP Chair: Sheila Dwyer, LIGO Laboratory Room: 251C |
Monday, April 18, 2016 1:30PM - 1:42PM |
S15.00001: Reproducible Analysis and Blindness in a Null Test of Newton's Gravitational Inverse Square Law At Sub-millimeter Scales Charles Hagedorn, Krishna Venkateswara, Jens Gundlach Proper execution of an experiment is independent of its result. Physicists who test fundamental physical law face the reality that signals for new physics receive more attention and scrutiny than null results. Yet, null results may have greater impact upon the direction of both experiment and theory. Blind experiments and result-blind review are bulwarks against systematic human bias for both experimenters and referees. I'll describe the method that made possible an irreversible public unblinding of our torsion-balance parallel-plate test of gravity at submillimeter scales in 2015. One publicly-available computer procedure generated from blind raw data the analysis, the final result, and the complete documenting thesis. The experiment included an optical "foil monitor" to constrain a systematic effect intrinsic to all short-range parallel-plate gravity experiments. I'll describe the experiment, successes, lessons learned, and result. [Preview Abstract] |
Monday, April 18, 2016 1:42PM - 1:54PM |
S15.00002: Development of a Torsion Balance Experiment to Investigate Gravitation at the Sub-Millimeter Range Adam Archibald, Mike Abercrombie, Tsitsi Nousinov, Kasey Wagoner, Ramanath Cowsik This talk will discuss our efforts to investigate possible violations of the inverse-square law of gravity at ranges below 1 cm. An instrument of novel design, sensitive to such violations, has been constructed and being operated in the basement of Rudolph Hall, Washington University in Saint Louis. We will discuss the main design features and calibration of the instrument to assess its sensitivity. We will provide the first results from our study of possible violations for a range of several millimeters. We conclude with a discussion of prospects for the future. [Preview Abstract] |
Monday, April 18, 2016 1:54PM - 2:06PM |
S15.00003: Torsion Balance Test of Einstein's Equivalence Principle Michael Abercrombie, Adam Archibald, Tsitsi Nussinov, Kasey Wagoner, Ramanath Cowsik We have developed a torsion balance experiment to test the equivalence principle (EP) which follows the solar attractor approach pioneered by Dicke in the early 1960s. By monitoring the response of a balance arranged as a composition dipole with an azimuthally symmetric mass distribution to the gravitational field produced by the Sun, we search for a diurnal modulation of the balance which would indicate a violation of the EP. Since reporting on the status of this experiment last year, the instrument has begun collecting data at a remote underground site. This talk will cover the design and fundamental sensitivity of the balance, and present the results of preliminary analysis of over 1200 hours of data. [Preview Abstract] |
Monday, April 18, 2016 2:06PM - 2:18PM |
S15.00004: Optically Levitated Microspheres as a Probe for New Interactions Alexander Rider, David Moore, Charles Blakemore, Marie Lu, Giorgio Gratta We are developing novel techniques to probe new interactions at micron distances using optically levitated dielectric microspheres. Levitated microspheres are an ideal probe for short-range interactions because they are suspended using the radiation pressure at the focus of a laser beam, which means that the microspheres can be precisely manipulated and isolated from the surrounding environment at high vacuum. We have performed a search for unknown charged particles bound within the bulk of the microspheres. Currently, we are searching for the presence of a Chameleon field postulated to explain the presence of dark energy in the universe. In the future we plan to use optically levitated microspheres to search for micron length-scale gravity like interactions that could couple between a microsphere and another mass. We will present resent results from these experiments and plans for future searches for new interactions. [Preview Abstract] |
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