<p>As successful as the Standard Model has been in describing particle interactions, there are still many open questions it does not answer; the strong CP violation and the existence of dark matter among them. To address these issues many extensions to the Standard Model have been devised. Some of these extensions propose a new force mediating particle; a massive particle results in a potential described by a Yukawa-like interaction, while a massless exchange particle leads to power law type potentials. Limits on the strength of these interactions at the sub-micron range of separation between two particles are poorly characterized, but previous experiments conducted at IUPUI placed the best limits to date on the strength of a Yukawa-like interaction. Those experiments used a spherical test mass and a planar source mass. However, if a cylindrical test mass was used, the increased interaction volume of the cylinder would result in an increased sensitivity of about an order of magnitude over the spherical test mass experiment. Building such a system presents many challenges, namely the alignment of the cylinder with respect to the planar source mass. A capacitance based scheme to determine the alignment of a cylinder with respect to a plane will be discussed. The thesis concludes with an outline for a new type of measurement system. The new experiment attempts to induce a gravitational Π-pulse in a nanoshphere to probe extensions to the Standard Model.</p> <p> </p>

In dieser Arbeit berechnen wir die gravitativen Ein-Schleifen-Korrekturen zu den Propagatoren und Wechselwirkungen der Felder des Standardmodells der Elementarteilchenphysik. Wir betrachten hierzu ein höherdimensionales brane-world-Modell: Wärend die Gravitonen, die Austauchteilchen der Gravitationswechselwirkung, in der gesamten D-dimensionalen Raumzeit propagieren können, sind die Materiefelder an eine d-dimensionale Untermanigfaltigkeit (brane) gebunden. Um die divergenten Anteile der Ein-Schleifen-Diagramme zu bestimmen, entwickeln wir ein neues Regularisierungschema welches einerseits die Wardidentitäten der Yang-Mills-Theorie respektiert anderseits sensitiv für potenzartige Divergenzen ist. Wir berechnen die gravitativen Beiträge zu den beta-Funktionen der Yang-Mills-Eichtheorie, der quartischen Selbst-Wechselwirkung skalarer Felder und der Yukawa-Wechselwirkung zwischen Skalaren und Fermionen. Im physikalisch besonders interessanten Fall einer vier-dimensionalen Materie-brane verschwinden die gravitativen Beiträge zum Laufen der Yang-Mills-Kopplungskonstante. Die führenden Beiträge zum Laufen der anderen beiden Kopplungskonstanten sind positiv. Diese Ergebnisse sind unabhängig von der Anzahl der Extradimensionen in denen die Gravitonen propagieren können. Des Weiteren bestimmen wir alle gravitationsinduzierten Ein-Schleifen-Konterterme mit höheren kovarianten Ableitungen für skalare Felder, Dirac-Fermionen und Eichbosonen. Ein Vergleich dieser Konterterme mit den höheren Ableitungsoperatoren des Lee-Wick-Standardmodells zeigt, dass die Gravitationskorrekturen nicht auf letzte beschränkt sind. Eine Beziehung zwischen Quantengravitation und dem Lee-Wick-Standardmodell besteht somit nicht. / In this thesis, we derive the gravitational one-loop corrections to the propagators and interactions of the Standard Model field. We consider a higher dimensional brane world scenario: Here, gravitons can propagate in the whole D dimensional space-time whereas the matter fields are confined to a d dimensional sub-manifold (brane). In order to determine the divergent part of the one-loop diagrams, we develop a new regularisation scheme which is both sensitive for polynomial divergences and respects the Ward identities of the Yang-Mills theory. We calculate the gravitational contributions to the beta functions of non-Abelian gauge theories, the quartic scalar self-interaction and the Yukawa coupling between scalars and fermions. In the physically interesting case of a four dimensional matter brane, the gravitational contributions to the running of the Yang-Mills coupling constant vanish. The leading contributions to the other two couplings are positive. These results do not depend on the number of extra dimensions. We further compute the gravitationally induced one-loop counterterms with higher covariant derivatives for scalars, Dirac fermions and gauge bosons. In is shown that these counterterms do not coincide with the higher derivative terms in the Lee-Wick standard model. A possible connection between quantum gravity and the latter cannot be inferred.