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Colorado School of Mines

The search for answers to some of the deepest questions in all of science begins with listening to the Universe’s quietest voices: neutrinos, dark matter, and the rarest nuclear processes.  These signals carry unique information about the basic laws of nature, yet they are extraordinarily faint, and their observation requires extreme levels of experimental sensitivity and control over environmental backgrounds. Neutrinos, in particular, provide a unique bridge between cosmology and the laboratory. They shaped the early Universe, influenced the largest structures we observe today, and link the physics of the cosmos to the quantum scale. Recent progress across many fields of science and engineering has enabled us to construct tools to hear such signals at (and even beyond) the standard quantum limit. In this talk, I will show how developments in superconducting sensors, optically levitated nanoparticles, and crystals doped with exotic nuclei are turning silence into discovery. These advances have enabled new approaches to measure the absolute masses of neutrinos, uniquely probe their quantum properties, and potentially search for the relic neutrinos from the Big Bang — paving the way for breakthroughs that bridge particle physics and cosmology.