Measuring gravity at the micron scale with laser-cooled trapped microspheres: a continuation

In this proposal, we will continue to develop an experiment using laser-cooled trapped micro-spheres to test for Yukawa-type deviations from Newtonian gravity at the micron length scale. The project is conceptually divided into three tasks: (1) refinement of techniques to position levitated nanospheres within few-micron distances from a source mass surface, (2) investigation of systematic errors in preliminary gravity measurements, (3) in-parallel development of novel methods for trapping and cooling the levitated nanoparticles, including sympathetic cooling with cold atoms.