Preparing for the Thorium-229 revolution

by Gilad Perez (Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel)

Thursday 9 Jan 2025, 16:00 → 17:30 Europe/Zurich

After a brief introduction related to ultralight (pseudo) scalar dark matter, we shall describe the current status of searches for ultralight dark matter (UDM). We explain why modern clocks can be used to search for both scalar and axion dark matter fields. We review existing and new types of well-motivated models of UDM and argue that they all share one key ingredient - their dominant coupling is to the QCD/nuclear sector.

This is very exciting as we are amidst a revolution in the field of dark matter searches as laser excitation of Th-229 with effective precision of 1:10^13 has been recently achieved, which as we show, is already probing uncharted territory of models. Furthermore, Th-229-based nuclear clock can potentially improve the sensitivity to physics of dark matter and beyond by factor of 10^10. To what extent we trust this enhancement factor and what are the potential implications will be also briefly discussed.