Photon and graviton mass limits
By A. Goldhaber, Michael Martin Nieto. 2008
375 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Efforts to place limits on deviations from canonical formulations of electromagnetism and gravity have probed length scales increasing dramatically over time. Historically, these studies have passed through three stages: (1) testing the power in the inverse-square laws of Newton and Coulomb, (2) seeking a nonzero value for the rest mass of photon or graviton, and (3) considering more degrees of freedom, allowing mass while preserving explicit gauge or general-coordinate invariance. Since the previous review the lower limit on the photon Compton wavelength has improved by four orders of magnitude, to about one astronomical unit, and rapid current progress in astronomy makes further advance likely. For gravity there have been vigorous debates about even the concept of graviton rest mass. Meanwhile there are striking observations of astronomical motions that do not fit Einstein gravity with visible sources. ''Cold dark matter'' (slow, invisible classical particles) fits well at large scales. ''Modified Newtonian dynamics'' provides the best phenomenology at galactic scales. Satisfying this phenomenology is a requirement if dark matter, perhaps as invisible classical fields, could be correct here too. ''Dark energy''might be explained by a graviton-mass-like effect, with associated Compton wavelength comparable to the radius of the visible universe. Significant mass limitsmore » are summarized in a table.« less
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/25b5654b841e392eb3461ac50e2cd8f43a960642
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Citations in the corpus
- Dark photon limits: A handbook (2021, methodology): “Many model-independent bounds on the existence of the DP in Nature have been obtained through tests of the Coulomb 1/r2 force law, or, equivalently, via bounds on the photon mass [70].”
- Superradiance: Energy Extraction, Black-Hole Bombs and Implications for Astrophysics and Particle Physics (2015, background): “For example massive vector fields (“dark photons” [330]) arise in the so-called hidden U(1) sector [331, 332, 333, 334, 335].”
- Theoretical Aspects of Massive Gravity (2011, neutral): “7× 10−32 eV [247, 248], about”
- Cosmic acceleration from Abelian symmetry breaking (2014, background): “Let us point out that the non-linear vector interactions we are analyzing, with their associated strong coupling effects, can considerably affect the existing bounds: see [25] for a critical discussion on photon mass limits.”
- Inconsistency of islands in theories with long-range gravity (2021, background): “Some more discussion of this effect from a phenomenological perspective can be found in [98].”
- Superradiance (2015, background): “For example, massive vector fields (“dark photons” [432, 433]) arise in the so-called hidden U(1) sector [434, 435, 436, 437, 438].”