Particle Physics

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. What can we do with this new-found precision? How can we exploit this exquisite ability to listen carefully for probing new physics?

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. This analysis 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.