München 2019 – scientific programme

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GR: Fachverband Gravitation und Relativitätstheorie

GR 8: Quantum Cosmology and Quantum Gravity I

GR 8.6: Talk

Wednesday, March 20, 2019, 15:45–16:00, HS 4

Ramsey Gravity Resonance Spectrosopy with Ultracold Neutrons as a Tool to Probe the Dark Sector — •René Sedmik¹, Joachim Bosina^1,2, Peter Geltenbort², Andrei Ivanov¹, Tobias Jenke², Jakob Micko^1,2, Mario Pitschmann¹, Tobias Rechberger¹, Martin Thalhammer¹, and Hartmut Abele¹ — ¹Technische Universität Wien, Atominstitut, 1020 Vienna, Austria — ²Institut Laue-Langevin, 38042 Grenoble, France

While being very successful, general relativity and the standard model of particle physics – presently forming the basis of our physical understanding – seem incomplete due to their incapability to adequately describe dark energy and dark matter. Slowly being accepted, this fact has fuelled a surge in developments of possible modifications of these two theories. Accordingly, numerous experimental attempts testing such modifications have been reported. In this respect, neutrons have proven to be ideal test bodies. With their vanishing electric charge and negligible polarizability, they evade many of the technical difficulties typically plaguing high precision measurements with atoms, molecules, or macroscopic test bodies. The qBounce collaboration has repeatedly used ultracold neutrons to set tight limits on several candidate models aiming to explain the observed dark sector effects. In this talk, we present the next step in the development of qBounce: Ramsey-type gravity resonance spectroscopy. We discuss the implementation, prospects, and challenges of this new method, and show first results yielding an unambiguous proof of principle.