Physics breakthroughs don’t always require city-sized particle colliders or giant radio telescope arrays. The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the Simons Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation have partnered to fund 11 innovative “tabletop” experiments, many of which will explore realms of physics typically probed by large-scale facilities.
The newly funded projects, selected from hundreds of proposals, include hunting for dark matter, building ultra-precise atomic clocks, and examining the intersection of general relativity and quantum mechanics. These ambitious experiments all aim at expanding the frontiers of fundamental physics while still fitting into a typical room-sized university physics research lab.
By pooling their resources and expertise, the foundations have magnified the impact of their grantmaking and are able to collectively fund more projects.
Each of the projects, described below, will receive funding for up to five years, with the four foundations together pledging more than $30 million over five years for all the undertakings.
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