Biographical Sketch:
Cecily Lowe is a physics Ph.D. student in Dr. David Moore’s lab at Yale University, where she
leverages levitated optomechanical sensors to search for dark matter through precision force
detection and momentum recoil measurements at the quantum limit. Cecily currently leads the
microsphere array experiment in the Moore Lab, developing a novel multi-sensor detection
method to enhance sensitivity to weakly interacting dark matter candidates.
Prior to Yale, Cecily earned a Bachelor of Arts in Physics and Data Science from the University
of California, Berkeley, where she conducted research across a diverse range of experimental
fields spanning quantum sensing, optical systems, and fundamental particle physics. At
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, she worked on the ATLAS experiment with Professor
Haichen Wang, studying the Higgs boson’s self interaction to probe physics beyond the Standard
Model. At NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, she worked with Dr. Nan Yu to design an optical
stabilization system for a microgravity atom interferometer to constrain dark energy models. In
Professor Holger Müller’s laboratory at UC Berkeley, she developed an autonomous optical
inspection system to optimize high intensity laser cavities for atom interferometry. These
experiences helped define her path as a researcher, as she aims to develop novel instrumentation that advances the sensitivity frontier of experimental searches for physics beyond the Standard
Model.
Research:
Cecily Lowe’s current research at Yale University focuses on developing quantum-limited
mechanical sensors to search for dark matter using levitated optomechanical arrays. Working
under Dr. David Moore, she leads the microsphere array experiment, which employs a 2D array
of optically levitated silica spheres operating in high vacuum to detect tiny forces sensitive to
interactions with dark matter. By measuring the momentum recoil of these trapped microspheres,
her work probes dark matter candidates that couple to matter through extremely weak
interactions that lie beyond the sensitivity of traditional particle detectors.
To achieve the required sensitivity, Cecily is pioneering techniques to suppress the dominant
sources of noise in the system. She is developing a UV discharging system that allows precise,
individual control of each sphere’s charge, eliminating electrostatic coupling between spheres. In
tandem, she is implementing active feedback cooling to stabilize each sphere’s motion by
counteracting residual heating and mechanical vibrations. By pushing the array toward operation
at the Standard Quantum Limit, Cecily’s work will enable a dark matter search using an array of
levitated sensors, opening unexplored regions of the dark matter parameter space.
Education:
- Ph.D. in Physics, Yale University — in progress
Advisor: Dr. David Moore - B.A. in Physics, University of California, Berkeley
- B.A. in Data Science, University of California, Berkeley
Honors & Awards:
- NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (2025)
- Marshall Plan Foundation Scholarship (2025)
- Berkeley Physics Undergraduate Research Scholars Program Award (2021, 2022)
- UC Berkeley Honors in Physics (2021)
Selected Publications:
B. Siegel, G. Afek, C. Lowe, J. Wang, Y.-H. Tseng, T. W. Penny, and D. C. Moore*,
“Optical levitation of arrays of microspheres,” Phys. Rev. A 111, 033514 (2025).
https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.111.033514
