Recently, a research team from the Department of Physics at Nanjing University, in collaboration with teams from the School of Astronomy and Space Science at Nanjing University, the University of Science and Technology of China, and Zhejiang University, has achieved a major advancement in the field of dark energy detection. The research team developed a magnetically levitated precision force measurement system to conduct high-precision experimental tests on the symmetron dark energy theory. The experimental precision achieved in this study has improved the current international state-of-the-art level by six orders of magnitude, covering a vast parameter space that was previously unexplored by existing experimental systems. The research findings, titled "Experimental constraints on symmetron field with magnetically levitated force sensor," were published online in the journal Nature Astronomy on January 20th and were highlighted as a featured article in the Research Briefings.

Figure 1. The precision measurement system for the fifth force based on a magnetically levitated mechanical oscillator (left panel) and the experimental results of force measurement (right panel).

Figure 2. Dark energy detection results: The excluded parameter space for symmetron theories in the λ-Ms plane (left) and the Ms-μ (right). The colored regions represent parameter spaces that have been experimentally tested and excluded, with the red region indicating the results of this study.
Three researchers from Nanjing University: Dr. Peiran Yin, associate research fellow from the Department of Physics, graduate students Xiangyu Xu from the School of Astronomy and Space Science and Kenan Tian from the Department of Physics are the co-first authors of the paper. Dr. Shaochun Lin from the University of Science and Technology of China, NJU Professor Pu Huang from the Department of Physics, NJU Professor Jianhua He from the School of Astronomy and Space Science, and Academician Jiangfeng Du from Zhejiang University are the co-corresponding authors.
The article titled "Experimental constraints on the symmetron field with a magnetically levitated force sensor" can be accessed via the following link: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-024-02465-8.