Probe chameleon dark energy with the coupling between a levitated nanodiamond and the single-spin

Jian Liu and Ka-Di Zhu

The chameleon scalar field is a dark energy candidate with the screening mechanism. In the present article we provide a spectral scheme to search the chameleon field between an optically levitated nanodiamond with a nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center and a silicon microsphere. The results show that a large optical nonlinear effect with ultranarrow bandwidth can be induced by the coupling of single spin and the levitated resonator. We find that the oscillator will present a distinct shift due to the chameleons, and the shift can be read out on the probe spectrum. Considering the noise limit, this constraint is about 2–3 orders of magnitude stronger than the ones from atom interferometry under the ultralow pressure. We expect this technique will become a valuable tool in optimizing future searches for chameleon fields and related theories.

DOI