Department of Physics
Research, teaching and outreach in Physics at UW–Madison

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NPAC (Nuclear/Particle/Astro/Cosmo) Forum
Magic, precise, and electroweak
Date: Thursday, November 17th
Time: 2:30 pm
Place: 4274 Chamberlin Hall
Speaker: Andrei Derevianko, University of Nevada-Reno
Abstract: Precision timepieces are marvels of human ingenuity. Over the past half-a-century, precision time-keeping has been carried out with atomic clocks. I will review a novel and rapidly developing class of atomic clocks, optical lattice clocks. At their projected accuracy level, these would neither lose nor gain a fraction of a second over estimated age of the Universe. In other words, if someone were to build such a clock at the Big Bang and if such a timepiece were to survive the 14 billion years, the clock would be off by no more than a mere second. I will also talk about the next frontier: nuclear clock.

In the second part I will overview atomic searches for new physics beyond the Standard Model of elementary particles. I will report on a refined analysis of table-top experiments on violation of mirror symmetry in atoms that sets powerful constraints on a hypothesized particle, the extra Z-boson. Our raised bound on the Z' masses improves upon the Tevatron results and carves out a lower-energy part of the discovery reach of the Large Hadron Collider.
Host: Mark Saffman
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