Applied Physics Seminar
Holger Müller successfully applied for his first patent when he was 14. Later, he did his undergraduate thesis with Jürgen Mlynek at the University of Konstanz, Germany. He graduated from Humboldt-University, Berlin, with Achim Peters as advisor. Müller received a fellowship of the Alexander von Humboldt foundation and joined the group of Steven Chu in Stanford as a postdoc. In July 2008, he joined the physics faculty at U.C. Berkeley.
Interpreting quantum mechanics and extending it to describe gravitational fields still holds profound mysteries. We show that the theory – relativistic, with spin, in strong gravity – can be re-constructed as a picture of waves oscillating at the Compton frequency mc^2/h that are red-shifted and time-dilated just like conventional clocks (m is the particle mass). We find an exact form of the Dirac equation in curved space-time that is well-suited for finding analytical or numerical solutions.
The talk will focus on our experiments that were inspired by this picture: (i) tests of the equivalence principle at 10^-9 accuracy; (ii) a clock that measures time by the Compton frequency of cesium atoms and a planned gravitational Aharonov-Bohm experiment, showing that a massive particle is all that is needed to define a time-scale, on paper and in the lab; (iii) a realization of the unit of mass with state of the art precision. Moreover, (iv) our ongoing measurement of the fine structure constant. At 2x10^-9 accuracy, it has been the world's third best. We have since reduced the leading systematic error about 8-fold and the statistical error about 10-fold. As an outlook, we will discuss atom interferometry in space, with antimatter, and for gravitational wave detection.