Please join us for an informal seminar sponsored by the Atomic and Molecular Physics Division and ITAMP, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. (Complete schedule at http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/amp/events.html) 2:00 PM Wednesday October 19, 2011 Pratt Conference Room 60 Garden St., Cambridge, MA 02138 Magic, precise, and electroweak Andrei Derevianko (Physics Department, University of Nevada, Reno) Precision timepieces are marvels of human ingenuity. Over the past half-a-century, precision time-keeping has been carried out with atomic clocks. I will review a novel and rapidly developing class of atomic clocks, optical lattice clocks. At their projected accuracy level, these would neither lose nor gain a fraction of a second over estimated age of the Universe. In other words, if someone were to build such a clock at the Big Bang and if such a timepiece were to survive the 14 billion years, the clock would be off by no more than a mere second. In the second part of my talk I will overview atomic searches for new physics beyond the Standard Model of elementary particles. I will report on a refined analysis of table-top experiments on violation of mirror symmetry in atoms that sets new constraints on a hypothesized particle, the extra Z-boson. Our raised bound on the Z' masses improves upon the Tevatron results and carves out a lower-energy part of the discovery reach of the Large Hadron Collider. _______________________________________________ Aspuru-meetings-list mailing list Aspuru-meetings-list(a)lists.fas.harvard.edu https://lists.fas.harvard.edu/mailman/listinfo/aspuru-meetings-list