Yale physicist wins Moore Foundation award to expand tabletop neutrino research
David Moore receives a five-year, $1.35 million Moore Foundation award to develop levitated cryogenic particles for tabletop neutrino studies.
The story in focus
Yale physicist David Moore has been named a Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation Experimental Physics Investigator. The five-year, $1.35 million award, announced Oct. 1, will support tabletop experiments using levitated, cryogenic particles to study neutrinos and potentially dark matter and quantum gravity.
- David Moore is an associate professor of physics at Yale.
- The award is a five-year, $1.35 million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.
- Moore plans to trap and cool tiny solid particles to measure recoil forces and energy deposits from tritium decays.
Award details
David Moore, associate professor of physics at Yale, has been named a Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation Experimental Physics Investigator. The five-year, $1.35 million award was announced Oct. 1. Moore said the support would be more difficult to obtain from federal sources given the high-risk, high-reward nature of the research.
Tabletop approach
Moore aims to study neutrinos in a tabletop setup rather than at large facilities such as underground labs, the South Pole, or nuclear reactors. He will develop levitated, cryogenic particles trapped in a vacuum and cooled to just a few degrees above absolute zero. These particles would measure recoil forces and small internal energy deposits from nuclear decays of tritium.
Goals and broader applications
Moore said that if successful, the team wants to identify a new type of tritium decay that has not been seen before and may produce neutrinos at an extremely precise energy. Such neutrinos could offer new ways to study neutrino properties with high precision. The award will help purchase an optical cryostat and support postdoctoral researchers and students. Moore said the same approach could also test the quantum nature of gravity and search for hard-to-detect dark matter.
What will the Moore Foundation award fund?
The five-year, $1.35 million award will support tabletop experiments with levitated, cryogenic particles to study neutrinos via tritium decays, purchase an optical cryostat, and fund postdoctoral researchers and students.
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