Violation of the equivalence principle from light scalar dark matter

By A. Hees, O. Minazzoli, E. Savalle, Y. V. Stadnik, P. Wolf. Physical Review D, 2018

139 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In this paper, we study the local observational consequences of a violation of the Einstein Equivalence Principle induced by models of light scalar Dark Matter (DM). We focus on two different models where the scalar field couples linearly or quadratically to the standard model of matter fields. For both these cases, we derive the solutions of the scalar field. We also derive from first principles the expressions for two types of observables: (i) the local comparison of two atomic sensors that are differently sensitive to the constants of Nature and (ii) the local differential acceleration between two test-masses with different compositions. For the linear coupling, we recover that the signatures induced by DM on both observables are the sum of harmonic and Yukawa terms. For the quadratic coupling on the other hand, the signatures derived for both types of observables turn out to be a sum of a time independent term and of an harmonic oscillation, whose amplitudes both depend on the position. Such a behavior is new and can make experiments in space more sensitive than terrestrial ones. Besides, the observables present some interesting non-linear behaviors that are due to the amplification or to the screening of the scalar-field, depending on the parameters of the theory, and on the compactness of the source of the gravitational field. Finally, we infer the various limits on the DM coupling parameters by using existing frequency comparisons on the one hand and tests of the universality of free fall on the ground (torsion balances) or in space (MICROSCOPE mission) on the other hand. We show that in the quadratic case, so-called natural parameters are still allowed by observations.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/df1a602bba812ad5020586bf5f384786623f1192

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. Marek Lewicki
2. John Ellis
3. V. Vaskonen
4. O. Buchmueller
5. D. Blas
6. M. Haehnelt
7. C. Burrage
8. J. March-Russell

In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

1. Marek Lewicki
2. John Ellis
3. M. Haehnelt
4. Kai Bongs
5. R. Maiolino

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

1. Marek Lewicki
2. John Ellis
3. O. Buchmueller
4. D. Blas
5. M. Haehnelt
6. C. Burrage
7. J. March-Russell
8. R. Maiolino

Citations in the corpus

• Relaxion stars and their detection via atomic physics (2019, unknown): “[10, 15–17, 20, 21, 24–27]).”
• AION: an atom interferometer observatory and network (2019, background): “ated experiments. We see in Fig.3that for a scalar mass ˘10 15 eV the sensitivity goal for AION-10 would already improve on the limits on a scalar DM-electron coupling set by the MICROSCOPE satellite [46] by about an order of magnitude. We also see that the initial sensitivity of AION-100 would prob”