Speaker
Description
In recent years, astrophysical dark matter research is rapidly expanding towards ultralight bosons and new detection techniques are appearing on the horizon. Among these, the detection of small forces at frequency f = mA c^2/h (mA is the mass of the boson) on mechanical systems, a path opened by the Gravitational Wave detectors Virgo and LIGO, particularly in the mass region 10-14 to 10-11 eV. In the case of smaller masses, torsion pendulums or specially sized balances are promising detectors. In our case, a prototype balance built for the Archimedes experiment reached a limit on the coupling constant not far from the limits set by indirect measurements (MICROSCOPE), so that a better apparatus, actually the Archimedes balance currently under construction, embodies a concrete possibility to extend the direct search for the B-L dark photon beyond the region explorable with Gravitational Wave detectors.
