Journal
SCIENTIFIC REPORTS
Volume 5, Issue -, Pages -Publisher
NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP
DOI: 10.1038/srep08058
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Funding
- Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship within the 7th European Community Framework Programme FP7-PEOPLE-IEF [PIEF-GA-2011-297557]
- European Union FP7 ITN-INVISIBLES (Marie Curie Actions) [PITN-GA-2011-289442]
- UK funding agency EPSRC [EP/J014664/1]
- John F Templeton foundation [39530]
- STFC [ST/J000396/1, ST/J001600/1]
- Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council [EP/J014664/1] Funding Source: researchfish
- Science and Technology Facilities Council [ST/L000296/1, ST/J001600/1, ST/J000396/1] Funding Source: researchfish
- EPSRC [EP/J014664/1] Funding Source: UKRI
- STFC [ST/J001600/1, ST/J000396/1, ST/L000296/1] Funding Source: UKRI
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Dark Matter (DM) is an elusive form of matter which has been postulated to explain astronomical observations through its gravitational effects on stars and galaxies, gravitational lensing of light around these, and through its imprint on the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). This indirect evidence implies that DM accounts for as much as 84.5% of all matter in our Universe, yet it has so far evaded all attempts at direct detection, leaving such confirmation and the consequent discovery of its nature as one of the biggest challenges in modern physics. Here we present a novel form of low-mass DM chi that would have been missed by all experiments so far. While its large interaction strength might at first seem unlikely, neither constraints from particle physics nor cosmological/astronomical observations are sufficient to rule out this type of DM, and it motivates our proposal for direct detection by optomechanics technology which should soon be within reach, namely, through the precise position measurement of a levitated mesoscopic particle which will be perturbed by elastic collisions with chi particles. We show that a recently proposed nanoparticle matter-wave interferometer, originally conceived for tests of the quantum superposition principle, is sensitive to these collisions, too.
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