Experimental Cosmology
— seeing the universe from laboratories.
Tabletop Dark Energy
Experimental Cosmology - Computational Physics - Dark Energy
Seminar Talk at University of Cambridge, Cavendish Astrophysics (Dec 2020); Murakami et al. (in prep)
Figure: The sensitivity of Big-G measurement experiment (Tu et al. 2010) to cosmological Chameleon field by its coupling strength. X-axis: strength of Chameleon's coupling to ambient matter densities. Y-axis: The scale of the slope of torque on the rotating pendulum by various sources (pure gravity, the uncertainty of gravity, deviation from other experiments, and Chameleon field).
"Among proposed theories for dark energy, Chameleon theory has a unique feature that may be detectable using laboratory experiments. In this work,
we have developed a set of tools to perform the detailed 3D simulation of the Chameleon field with a custom geometry of ambient density distribution. By revisiting existing experiments of gravity, this simulation quantifies the effect of the Chameleon, effectively testing the cosmological theory at the local scale. The preliminary results of our simulations suggest that the size of the Chameleon field's effect may be comparable to the experimental sensitivity, making this work a prototype of a new low-cost and effective method to test dark energy theories. Connecting theories with existing experiments, we aim to provide insights into their behavior at the local scale."