SPEAKER: Giovanni Cantatore (Dipartimento di Fisica - Università di Trieste, Trieste, IT)

 

TITLE: Searching for Dark Matter and Dark Energy at CERN with CAST

 

ABSTRACT: The nature of Dark Matter and Dark Energy has taken center stage among the most intriguing open questions of science. Dark Matter may well consist of the yet unseen ”axion” particles, while recently posited scalar “chameleon” fields could justify the observed density of Dark Energy. Both axions and chameleons could be produced in the Sun and stream to Earth, and the CAST helioscope at CERN has deployed a host of precision detection strategies to search for them, becoming, at the moment, the only experiment potentially sensitive to both Dark Matter and Dark Energy. The principles and techniques exploited at CAST in these experimental searches will be discussed, with a special emphasis on chameleon detection, which is pursued with a novel ultra-sensitive opto-mechanical sensor developed at INFN Trieste.