Karl van Bibber to lead research group awarded $3.7M to build new dark matter experiment

Last fall, a coalition of the Simons Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the John F. Templeton Foundation and the Gordon & Betty Moore foundation pledged a fund of $30M total for a 'tabletop experiments' solicitation. It was just announced that a team of researchers led by UCBNE faculty Karl van Bibber will be awarded $3.7M in funding to continue research about axions, particles believed to make up dark matter in the universe. Collaborators on the project include researchers from eleven institutions: UC Berkeley, Yale, Colorado, MIT, Johns Hopkins, Wellesley, ORNL, Stockholm, Iceland, ITMO/St. Petersburg and Cambridge. The experiment, “A Plasma Haloscope for the Post-Inflation Axion", will be sited at Yale, nearby the current HAYSTAC experiment, utilizing a large-bore 16 Tesla magnet. Berkeley's role is the development of metamaterial-based resonators for the conversion of dark matter axions into a very weak microwave signal, detectable with advanced quantum sensing techniques.

Learn more in the Simon Foundation announcement and the College of Engineering write-up.