Quantum Sensors for the Hidden Sector

Guest Speaker

Thursday, 13th November 2025 (19:45 - 22:00)

Venue: Meeting Room

The hidden sector means ultra-light particles that Physicists might have missed in the rush to detect all the heavy ones! In this talk I'll explain the possible importance of the hidden sector - why there might in fact be lots of light particles that haven't been detected in accelerators, how we go about trying to detect them, and other interesting things we can do with the detectors that we build. What all this has to do with astronomy is that the axion is an example of a hidden sector particle, and axions make a good dark matter candidate, but I hope to convince you that even if axions don't exist the science of axion detectors is interesting in its own right. 

Join the meeting online HERE if you can't attend in person

Speaker: Dr Ed Daw

Ed Daw is a professor in Physics at the University of Sheffield.

He's worked on many aspects of 'the Dark universe', including searches for two kinds of dark matter, axions and WIMPs, and the quest for direct detection of gravitational waves with the LIGO instruments, an effort which he joined in 1997.

He leads the University of Sheffield gravitational wave research group, which was a member of the team that announced the first and second direct detection's of gravitational waves from black hole binaries first discoveries were in 2015 (for black holes) and 2017 (for neutron stars)

Professor Ed Daw specializes in ultra-sensitive experiments searching for the signatures of hypothesized and potentially critical signals in the field of particle astrophysics. In particular, searches for WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles), gravitational waves, and axions.