Mechanical quantum sensors for dark matter and neutrinos

Many of the major open questions in fundamental physics involve particles or interactions that couple extremely weakly to laboratory sensors. Determining the properties of these weakly interacting particles, such as dark matter and neutrinos, may require detectors that employ quantum systems themselves as sensors to detect otherwise impossibly small interactions. In this talk I will describe techniques to measure the tiny forces imparted by individual sub-atomic particles using optically trapped nano- and microparticles in vacuum, whose motion can be controlled and read out in the quantum regime. Such sensors have already been used to detect the forces imparted by single nuclear decays inside the particles, and ongoing work aims to open a broad set of new searches for physics beyond the Standard Model with mechanical sensors.