Ken Van Tilburg (NYU / Flatiron Institute) — CANCELED
NOTE: This event has been canceled.
Searching for Odd Phenomena with Odd Detectors
Ken Van Tilburg (NYU / Flatiron Institute)
In this talk, I will describe two classes of experimental proposals to discover the QCD axion. Both exploit crystals that spontaneously break parity, combined with aligned nuclear spins that break time-reversal invariance. The first is the "piezoaxionic effect": an oscillating axion dark matter background produces a resonantly enhanced mechanical stress inside a piezoelectric crystal, read out electrically, targeting axion masses between 10-11 eV and 10-7 eV. The second is the "ferroaxionic force": a spin-polarized piezoelectric crystal sources a static axion field with an effective in-medium coupling up to seven orders of magnitude larger than in vacuum, detectable via nuclear spin precession and sensitive to masses from 10-5 eV to 10-2 eV. These phenomena and detectors are "odd" in the colloquial sense—they are unusual—but also in a precise sense: key observables and material properties flip sign when viewed in a mirror (P-odd) or played backwards in time (T-odd).