Kavli Affiliate: Giorgio Gratta
| Summary:
We report on a search for non-Newtonian forces that couple to mass, with a characteristic scale of $sim10~μ$m, using an optically levitated microsphere as a precision force sensor. A silica microsphere trapped in an upward-propagating, single-beam, optical tweezer is utilized to probe for interactions sourced from a nanofabricated attractor mass with a density modulation brought into close proximity to the microsphere and driven along the axis of periodic density in order to excite an oscillating response. We obtain force sensitivity of $lesssim10^-16~rmN/sqrtrmHz$. Separately searching for attractive and repulsive forces results in the constraint on a new Yukawa interaction of $|α| gtrsim 10^8$ for $λ> 10~μ$m. This is the first test of the inverse-square law using an optically levitated test mass of dimensions comparable to $λ$, a complementary method subject to a different set of systematic effects compared to more established techniques.
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