Precision measurements in solids: challenges and opportunities

Desperate times call for desperate measures. The scarcity of experimental evidence for new physics at colliders, in the face of cosmological mysteries such as dark matter and the baryon asymmetry of the universe, demands that we search for new physics in new ways. In this context, constraints from precision AMO measurements continue to probe some of the highest energy scales that are experimentally accessible today. The desire to gain ever-higher precision from AMO experiments naturally leads one to consider measurements using atoms, ions and molecules trapped within solids. On the one hand, such systems offer easy access to large numbers of trapped particles within a compact volume. But these attractions have to be balanced against open questions about the ability to prepare quantum states, maintain coherence and perform high-SNR measurements in solids. I will discuss some of the challenges and opportunities for precision measurements in solids, using examples from experiments in my group.