Abstract
Dark sectors lying beyond the Standard Model and containing sub-GeV particles which are bilinearly coupled to nucleons would induce quantum forces of the Casimir-Polder type in ordinary matter. Such new forces can be tested by a variety of experiments over many orders of magnitude. We provide a generic interpretation of these experimental searches and apply it to a sample of forces from dark scalars behaving as $1/r^3$, $1/r^5$, $1/r^7$ at short range. The landscape of constraints on such quantum forces differs from the one of modified gravity with Yukawa interactions, and features in particular strong short-distance bounds from molecular spectroscopy and neutron scattering.
Highlights
When going beyond the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics, it is natural to imagine the existence of other light particles, which would have been so far elusive because of their weak or vanishing interactions with the SM particles
Such speculations on dark sectors could be driven by theoretical curiosity there are more concrete motivations coming from two striking observational facts: dark matter and dark energy
Whenever one of the dark particles is light enough and couples to nucleons in a spinindependent way, it induces forces of the Casimir-Polder type, that are potentially accessible by fifth force experiments across many scales
Summary
When going beyond the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics, it is natural to imagine the existence of other light particles, which would have been so far elusive because of their weak or vanishing interactions with the SM particles Such speculations on dark sectors could be driven by theoretical curiosity there are more concrete motivations coming from two striking observational facts: dark matter and dark energy. If a light scalar coupled to nucleons, it would induce a fifth force of the form V 1⁄4 αe−r=λ=r, with λ 1⁄4 ħ=mc being the Compton wavelength of the scalar and m its mass The presence of such a Yukawa-like force is sometimes dubbed “modified gravity.”. Searches for dark sectors via loops of virtual dark particles include Refs. [6,12,13], and are yet under-represented in the literature
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