Brian D'Urso Receives NSF Grant for Collaborative Research Project

Brian D'Urso received an NSF award for a project, entitled "Collaborative Research: Measuring G with a Microsphere in a Magneto-Gravitational Trap". D'Urso and collaborators will tackle the question of whether the discrepancies in the measurements of the gravitational constant of the universe "G" are evidence of a non-constant G, reflective of some new gravitational theory beyond Einstein, or are they simply due to misunderstandings of experimental errors. They therefore propose a novel experimental setup based on the time-of-swing method, where a pair of field masses modifies the spring constant, and thus the oscillation frequency, of a simple harmonic oscillator. The unique feature of the proposed approach is that the simple harmonic oscillator consists of a microsphere levitated in a magnetic trap in ultra-high vacuum.

Read the full abstract here.