Traditionally, you need to tunnel under a mountain, trek to the South Pole, or set up shop near a nuclear reactor to study neutrinos - the tiny, neutral particles that pass through the universe undisturbed by anything other than gravity.
In other words, it requires a high level of commitment, in other words, both in terms of logistics and space as well as infrastructure and personnel.
Yale physicist David Moore has other ideas. He wants to study neutrinos on top of a table in his New Haven lab. And now that he's been named a Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation Experimental Physics Investigator, he'll be able to do it.
The five-year, $1.35 million award was announced Oct. 1.
"We are very excited about this generous support," Moore, an associate professor of physics in Yale's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, said on behalf of himself and his lab members. "This type of support would be more difficult to find from federal funding sources due to the high risk, high reward nature of the research."
Moore said the award comes at a "perfect" time to leverage his ongoing work developing tabletop experiments to study neutrinos and dark matter. It will also enable him to take his research in an ambitious new direction.
Moore will develop levitated, cryogenic particles that can be used to study the properties of neutrinos. He and his team will trap tiny, solid particles in a vacuum, cool them to just a few degrees above absolute zero, and then use them to measure the recoil forces and small, internal energy deposits from nuclear decays of the radioactive isotope tritium.
"If successful, we want to identify a new type of decay of tritium that hasn't been seen before, but which may produce neutrinos at an extremely precise energy," Moore said. "If these neutrinos can be produced, they may provide a whole new set of ways to study neutrino properties with extremely high precision."
In part, the award will help Moore purchase an optical cryostat that will do the cooling and support a team of postdoctoral researchers and students to develop the experiments.
Beyond neutrinos, the same approach could be applied to test the quantum nature of gravity and search for forms of dark matter that are difficult to detect with existing methods, Moore said.
