Magnetic Levitation for New Physics: From Dark Matter to Gravity

by Dorian Amaral (IFAE)

Thursday Dec 11, 2025, 12:00 PM → 1:00 PM Europe/Madrid

IFAE Seminar Room (In-Person)

Magnetic levitation technology offers force and displacement sensitivities at the quantum frontier, making it an attractive platform for probing the feeble interactions expected of beyond the Standard Model physics. Despite its promise, the case for magnetic levitation in fundamental physics applications is only just being built. In this talk, I will present the first search for ultralight dark matter using magnetic levitation and introduce two new experiments based on this technology: POLONAISE (Probing Oscillations using Levitated Objects for Novel Accelerometry In Searches of Exotic physics) and MORRIS (Magnetic Oscillatory Resonator for Rare-Interaction Studies). I will show how these experiments will have world-leading sensitivities to three fundamental physics cases: the hunt for ultralight dark matter, ultraheavy dark matter, and a non-Newtonian gravitational fifth force. I will present the results from a new paper on the detection of dark matter at the Planck scale with an array of levitated sensors. I will also show new projected constraints on fifth forces at ~mm scales - currently the most sensitive in this regime. These results demonstrate the power of magnetic levitation as a frontier tool for fundamental physics, opening new avenues for precision tests of physics and the hunt for dark matter.