Chameleon fields: awaiting surprises for tests of gravity in space.

By J. Khoury, A. Weltman. Physical Review Letters, 2003

1,297 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present a novel scenario where a scalar field acquires a mass which depends on the local matter density: the field is massive on Earth, where the density is high, but is essentially free in the solar system, where the density is low. All existing tests of gravity are satisfied. We predict that near-future satellite experiments could measure an effective Newton's constant in space different from that on Earth, as well as violations of the equivalence principle stronger than currently allowed by laboratory experiments.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Oceanography

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4e1e17f606ff5ca8db582b97968c167f820d1399

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Citations in the corpus

Dark energy or modified gravity? An effective field theory approach (2012, background): “This result for $ is calculated from a quadratic action, and so we stress that nonlinear effects such as the Vainshtein [33, 34, 35] and chameleon [36, 37] mechanisms are not present.”
The Ups and Downs of Early Dark Energy solutions to the Hubble tension: A review of models, hints and constraints circa 2023 (2023, background): “Other coupling can arise from chameleon models, as usually postualted for late-time dark energy [94, 121, 122].”
hi_class: Horndeski in the Cosmic Linear Anisotropy Solving System (2016, background): “– 2 – [19, 20], kinetic gravity braiding [21–23], covariant galileons [11, 24], disformal and Dirac-Born-Infeld gravity [25–27], Chameleons [28, 29], symmetrons [30, 31], Gauss-Bonnet couplings [32] and models screening the cosmological constant [33, 34].”
Approximate Universal Relations for Neutron Stars and Quark Stars (2016, background): “All of these constraints, however, can be avoided if one invokes a chameleon mechanism [336, 337] that forces f(R) gravity to reduce rapidly to General Relativity in regions with relatively high density, making the Starobinsky model still viable cosmologically.”
f(R) Theories Of Gravity (2008, methodology): “This is the chameleon mechanism, well-known in quintessence models (Khoury and Weltman, 2004a,b).”
Probing dark energy with atom interferometry (2014, background): “Although the chameleon field φ is properly described by relativistic quantum field theory, a simple relation describes its non-relativistic steady-state [4]: ∇(2)φ = − 5 φ2 + ρ M , (2.”