Oscillating nuclear charge radii as sensors for ultralight dark matter

Abstract

We show that coupling of ultralight dark matter (UDM) to quarks and gluons would lead to an oscillation of the nuclear charge radius for both the quantum chromodynamics (QCD) axion and scalar dark matter. Consequently, the resulting oscillation of electronic energy levels could be resolved with optical atomic clocks, and their comparisons can be used to investigate UDM-nuclear couplings, which were previously only accessible with other platforms. We demonstrate this idea using the ${}^2{S}_{1/2}(F=0)\leftrightarrow {}^2{F}_{7/2}(F=3)$ electric octupole and ${}^2{S}_{1/2}(F=0)\leftrightarrow {}^2{D}_{3/2}(F=2)$ electric quadrupole transitions in ${}^{171}Y{b}^{+}$. Based on the derived sensitivity coefficients for these two transitions and a long-term comparison of their frequencies using a single trapped ${}^{171}Y{b}^{+}$ ion, we find bounds on the scalar UDM-nuclear couplings and the QCD axion decay constant. These results are at a similar level compared to the tightest spectroscopic limits, and future investigations, also with other optical clocks, promise significant improvements.

6+3 pages, 2 figures; v2: Major revision of the supplementary material. Updated discussion, result unchanged; v3: matches version accepted by PRL

References in corpus (15)

• Nuclear Force from Lattice QCD
• Searching for dilaton dark matter with atomic clocks
• MICROSCOPE mission: final results of the test of the Equivalence Principle
• Nature of the f_0(600) from its N_c dependence at two loops in unitarized Chiral Perturbation Theory
• Search for axion-like dark matter through nuclear spin precession in electric and magnetic fields
• Improved limits on the coupling of ultralight bosonic dark matter to photons from optical atomic clock comparisons
• Search for ultralight dark matter from long-term frequency comparisons of optical and microwave atomic clocks
• Search for oscillations of fundamental constants using molecular spectroscopy
• The Phenomenology of Quadratically Coupled Ultra Light Dark Matter
• Relativistic corrections to isotope shift in light ions
• Search for ultralight dark matter with spectroscopy of radio-frequency atomic transitions
• Sensitivity to New Physics of Isotope Shift Studies using the Coronal Lines of Highly Charged Calcium Ions
• Deriving dilaton potential in improved holographic QCD from meson spectrum
• $\theta$-dependence of light nuclei and nucleosynthesis
• Relaxion Dark Matter from Stochastic Misalignment