Colloquium

Extraordinary success of particle accelerators and colliders during the past hundred years have contributed to the now widely accepted Standard Model (SM) of particle physics.  However, “quantum entanglement” has been at work from the microscopic to the macroscopic scale since the “Big bang” 13.8 billion years ago. Controlled exploitation of these primordial correlations and entanglements in the laboratory to probe and detect with high precision very weak signals in nature (exotic particles, fields and space-time distortions that may exist from the emerging very “early” and “dark” universe), will allow us to be ‘cosmic archaeologists.  This will demand development of ultra-sensitive “quantum sensors”. I will describe two such sensors: cavity-qubit based sensors and atomic beam sensors to probe the “early” and “dark” universe. Finally, I will highlight the achievement of optical stochastic cooling of single electrons in the laboratory which will allow us to probe the electron-photon entanglement and possibilities of “Cheshire cat” charge exchange between electrons and positrons.