Aarhus Universitets segl

Do light Dark Bosons exist?

Very light and feebly interacting bosons could potentially contribute significantly to the dark matter sector of our universe without being detectable at high-energy collider experiments. The CCQ group headed by Prof. Michael Drewsen has in a collaboration with researchers from the University of New South Wales in Sydney and Fermilab/University of Chicago applied a very different method to seek detection of such hypothetical bosons, namely, high-precision measurements of isotope shifts of electronic transitions in the Ca+ ion. This method is specifically sensitive to very light bosons interacting with neutrons and electrons through minute changes in the electronic energy levels. The unprecedented accuracy obtained in the isotope-shift measurements allowed the CCQ group to improve the previous bound on the coupling of such bosons by almost two orders of magnitude. These results were reported, back-to-back with similar results obtained with Yb+ ions at MIT in Physical Review Letters and featured in a Synopsis on the online site Physics by the American Physical Society.

The method has also been mentioned in Phys.org and Scientific American.