Magic, precise, and electroweak

Andrei Derevianko, University of Nevada-Reno



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.



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 that 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.