Aachen 2019 – scientific programme

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T: Fachverband Teilchenphysik

T 34: Axionen I

T 34.1: Talk

Tuesday, March 26, 2019, 16:00–16:15, S09

KWISP - Hunting Chameleons with the CAST Experiment at CERN — •Justin Baier, Horst Fischer, and Marc Schumann for the CAST collaboration — University of Freiburg

The KWISP (Kinetic Weakly Interacting Slim Particle) detector is part of the CAST experiment at CERN exploring the dark sector. It utilizes an ultrasensitive opto-mechanical force sensor for the search for solar chameleons. A chameleon is a hypothetical scalar particle postulated as dark energy candidate, which has a direct coupling to matter depending on the local density. Considering this characteristic a flux of solar chameleons hitting a solid surface at grazing incidence will, under certain conditions, reflect and exert the equivalent of a radiation pressure. To exploit this trait the KWISP sensor consists of a thin and rigid dielectric membrane placed inside a resonant optical Fabry-Pérot cavity utilizing an active electrooptical feedback system to keep the laser frequency-locked. In this talk, the principle and the setup of the KWISP detector will be explained and first results will be presented.