Evading equivalence principle violations, cosmological, and other experimental constraints in scalar field theories with a strong coupling to matter

By D. Mota, D. Shaw. 2006

261 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We show that, as a result of nonlinear self-interactions, it is feasible, at least in light of the bounds coming from terrestrial tests of gravity, measurements of the Casimir force and those constraints imposed by the physics of compact objects, big-bang nucleosynthesis and measurements of the cosmic microwave background, for there to exist, in our Universe, one or more scalar fields that couple to matter much more strongly than gravity does. These scalar fields behave like chameleons: changing their properties to fit their surroundings. As a result these scalar fields can be not only very strongly coupled to matter, but also remain relatively light over solar-system scales. These fields could also be detected by a number of future experiments provided they are properly designed to do so. These results open up an altogether new window, which might lead to a completely different view of the r\^ole played by light scalar fields in particle physics and cosmology.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/14c2e32cad3a222db1b1b6d1afb9d81788c16a5e

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

Citations in the corpus

Symmetron Cosmology (2011, background): “The effective coarse-grained description of chameleon theories, including careful considerations of averaging, has been derived in [28].”
Spatial variation in the fine-structure constant – new results from VLT/UVES (2012, background): “This could be possible if α depends on the local gravitational potential or density (Khoury & Weltman 2004; Mota & Shaw 2007; Olive & Pospelov 2008) – laboratory conditions differ quite significantly in this regard to the conditions in the quasar absorbers.”
Cosmology and Fundamental Physics with the Euclid Satellite (2012, background): “We mention here only that the presence of chameleon mechanisms [171, 672, 670, 172, 464, 173, 282] can, for example, modify the coupling depending on the environment.”
Modified Gravity and Cosmology (2011, background): “It can act as dark energy [191, 197], and has been studied in the context of structure formation [196, 188], as well as a number of other cosmological scenarios [912, 190, 913, 191, 484, 239, 362].”