Advance and prospects in constraining the Yukawa-type corrections to Newtonian gravity from the Casimir effect

TL;DR

This paper enhances constraints on Yukawa-type corrections to Newtonian gravity using Casimir force measurements, achieving significant improvements in the interaction range of 1.6 to 14 nm and proposing experimental modifications for even stronger constraints.

Contribution

The study provides the strongest constraints to date on Yukawa-type interactions in the nanometer range by analyzing Casimir force experiments and suggests experimental setups for further improvements.

Findings

Constraints strengthened by up to a factor of 2.4×10^7 in the 1.6-14 nm range.

Replacing a plane with a corrugated plate could improve constraints by a factor of 1.1×10^{12}.

Additional constraints obtained from Casimir pressure and Casimir-Polder force experiments.

Abstract

We report stronger constraints on the parameters of Yukawa-type corrections to Newtonian gravity from measurements of the lateral Casimir force between sinusoidally corrugated surfaces of a sphere and a plate. In the interaction range from 1.6 to 14 nm the strengthening of previously known high confidence constraints up to a factor of $2.4\times 10^7$ is achieved using these measurements. It is shown that the replacement of a plane plate with a corrugated one in the measurements of the normal Casimir force by means of an atomic force microscope would result in the strengthening of respective high confidence constraints on the Yukawa-type interaction by a factor of $1.1\times 10^{12}$. The use of a corrugated plate instead of a plane plate in the experiment by means of a micromachined oscillator also leads to strengthening of the obtained constraints. We further obtain constraints on the parameters of Yukawa-type interaction from the data of experiments measuring the gradient of the Casimir pressure between two parallel plates and the gradient of the Casimir-Polder force between an atom and a plate. The obtained results are compared with the previously known constraints. The possibilities of how to further strengthen the constraints on non-Newtonian gravity are discussed.