Abstract
Light bosons can mediate long-range forces. We show that light bosonic mediators interacting with a background medium, in particular, with the cosmic neutrino background (CνB), may induce medium-dependent masses which could effectively screen long-range forces from detection. This leads to profound implications for long-range force searches in e.g. the Eöt-Wash, MICROSCOPE, and lunar laser-ranging (LLR) experiments. For instance, we find that when the coupling of the mediator to neutrinos is above 3 × 10−10 or 5 × 10−13, bounds from LLR and experiments employing the Sun as an attractor, respectively, would be entirely eliminated. Larger values of the coupling can also substantially alleviate bounds from searches conducted at shorter distances.
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Acknowledgments
We thank Xuheng Luo for early discussions that inspired this work. The work of GC is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy under the award number DE-SC0020250 and DE-SC0020262. The work of XJX is supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under grant No. 12141501 and also by the CAS Project for Young Scientists in Basic Research (YSBR-099).
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Chauhan, G., Xu, XJ. Impact of the cosmic neutrino background on long-range force searches. J. High Energ. Phys. 2024, 255 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP07(2024)255
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP07(2024)255