Priel Nadav, Fieguth Alexander, Blakemore Charles P, Hough Emmett, Kawasaki Akio, Martin Denzal, Venugopalan Gautam, Gratta Giorgio
Department of Physics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA.
W.W. Hansen Experimental Physics Laboratory, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA.
Sci Adv. 2022 Oct 14;8(41):eabo2361. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.abo2361.
Optically levitated macroscopic objects are a powerful tool in the field of force sensing, owing to high sensitivity, absolute force calibration, environmental isolation, and the advanced degree of control over their dynamics that have been achieved. However, limitations arise from the spurious forces caused by electrical polarization effects that, even for nominally neutral objects, affect the force sensing because of the interaction of dipole moments with gradients of external electric fields. Here, we introduce a technique to measure, model, and eliminate dipole moment interactions, limiting the performance of sensors using levitated objects. This process leads to a noise-limited measurement with a sensitivity of 3.3 × 10 . As a demonstration, this is applied to the search for unknown charges of a magnitude much below that of an electron or for exceedingly small unbalances between electron and proton charges.
光学悬浮宏观物体是力传感领域的一种强大工具，这得益于其高灵敏度、绝对力校准、环境隔离以及对其动力学已实现的先进控制程度。然而，由于电偏振效应产生的杂散力会带来限制，即使对于名义上中性的物体，偶极矩与外部电场梯度的相互作用也会影响力传感。在此，我们介绍一种测量、建模和消除偶极矩相互作用的技术，这种相互作用限制了使用悬浮物体的传感器的性能。这一过程导致了噪声限制测量，灵敏度为3.3×10 。作为一个演示，这被应用于寻找电荷量远低于电子电荷量的未知电荷，或寻找电子与质子电荷之间极其微小的不平衡。
