Force and acceleration sensing with optically levitated nanogram masses at microkelvin temperatures

An apparatus that uses optically levitated objects, together with active feedback cooling, is used to provide an order-of-magnitude improvement on the sensitivity of state-of-the-art accelerometers. The results pave the way to using such sensors as a part of large-scale particle detectors, for assessing the neutrality of matter and dark matter, and for studying short-ranged Yukawa forces.