  It is well known that current spectroscopic determinations of the chemical
composition of the Sun are starkly at odds with the metallicity implied by
helioseismology. We investigate whether the discrepancy may be due to
conversion of photons to a new light boson in the solar photosphere. We examine
the impact of particles with axion-like interactions with the photon on the
inferred photospheric abundances, showing that resonant axion-photon conversion
is not possible in the region of the solar atmosphere in which line-formation
occurs. Although non-resonant conversion in the line-forming regions can in
principle impact derived abundances, constraints from axion-photon conversion
experiments rule out the couplings necessary for these effects to be
detectable. We show that this extends to hidden photons and chameleons (which
would exhibit similar phenomenological behaviour), ruling out known theories of
new light bosons as photospheric solutions to the solar abundance problem.
