Dark Matter Axions, Non-Newtonian Gravity and Constraints on Them from Recent Measurements of the Casimir Force in the Micrometer Separation Range

Abstract

We consider axionlike particles as the most probable constituents of dark matter, the Yukawa-type corrections to Newton’s gravitational law and constraints on their parameters following from astrophysics and different laboratory experiments. After a brief discussion of the results by Prof. Yu. N. Gnedin in this field, we turn our attention to the recent experiment on measuring the differential Casimir force between Au-coated surfaces of a sphere and the top and bottom of rectangular trenches. In this experiment, the Casimir force was measured over an unusually wide separation region from 0.2 to 8μm and compared with the exact theory based on first principles of quantum electrodynamics at nonzero temperature. We use the measure of agreement between experiment and theory to obtain the constraints on the coupling constant of axionlike particles to nucleons and on the interaction strength of a Yukawa-type interaction. The constraints obtained on the axion-to-nucleon coupling constant and on the strength of a Yukawa interaction are stronger by factors of 4 and 24, respectively, than those found previously from gravitational experiments and measurements of the Casimir force but weaker than the constraints following from a differential measurement where the Casimir force was nullified. Some other already performed and planned experiments aimed at searching for axions and non-Newtonian gravity are discussed, and their prospects are evaluated.

The beauty of curved momentum space

“…Much attention has been devoted to it during the last decades, mainly after its experimental confirmation by Lamoreaux in 1997 [20]. Given the vast bibliography on the subject, we limit ourselves to mentioning the reviews [21][22][23][24], where several references are gathered, as well as some of its late applications to constrain dark matter and alternative theories of gravity [25,26].…”

How to Strengthen Constraints on Non-Newtonian Gravity from Measuring the Lateral Casimir Force

“…First constraints on the Yukawa-and power-type corrections to Newtonian gravity were obtained in [19] and [20], respectively. In succeeding years, a lot of precision experiments on measuring the Casimir force and its gradient have been performed and their results were used for obtaining stronger constraints on the Yukawa-type corrections to Newton's gravitational law [21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32] (see also [33,34] for a review).…”

Entanglement based tomography to probe new macroscopic forces

“…The aim of this paper will be to provide a simple quantum-information lead entanglement protocol to confirm the SM interactions and to probe new physics in the particle physics and in the gravitational sectors. Very light and weakly coupled bosons could couple to the SM degrees of freedom, such as axion like particle, Kaluza-Klein modes from the extra dimensions, hidden sector photon [5,[7][8][9][10]. Axions with varied mass range is also expected in string theory [], which provides a huge motivation to look for these light bosons experimentally.…”

“…As such, there is only one important phase ∆φ(d, ∆x), which dictates whether or not the masses are entangled, which is why this arrangement is preferred. Further to these potentials, we will consider as an example of the Yukawa potential where we will constrain (α, λ), see [8,10].…”