Speaker
Description
Over 80% of the mass in the universe is made up of an invisible substance known as dark matter. But exactly is dark matter? This is a complete mystery. There are a number of hypotheses being tested by experiments throughout the world, among them the idea that dark matter is an ultralight bosonic field that interacts with atomic spins. The Global Network of Optical Magnetometers to search for Exotic physics (GNOME) is a worldwide array of atomic magnetometers that searches for transient interactions of atomic spins with invisible bosonic “walls” or “stars” or even bursts emanating from a cataclysmic astrophysical events like binary black hole mergers. We will discuss recent analysis of over a year of GNOME data to test a variety of beyond-the-Standard-Model theories, as well as future plans to improve GNOME's sensitivity to various dark matter scenarios.