Laboratory constraints on chameleon dark energy and power-law fields

TL;DR

This paper reports experimental constraints on chameleon dark energy models using the GammeV Afterglow Search, excluding significant ranges of coupling strengths and masses, thus narrowing the parameter space for these theories.

Contribution

It provides the first laboratory constraints on a broad class of chameleon dark energy models, including power-law and other dark energy scenarios.

Findings

Excluded five orders of magnitude in photon coupling.

Constrained chameleon effective mass over four orders of magnitude.

Excluded 4 to 12 orders of magnitude in matter coupling for specific models.

Abstract

We report results from the GammeV Chameleon Afterglow Search---a search for chameleon particles created via photon/chameleon oscillations within a magnetic field. This experiment is sensitive to a wide class of chameleon power-law models and dark energy models not previously explored. These results exclude five orders of magnitude in the coupling of chameleons to photons covering a range of four orders of magnitude in chameleon effective mass and, for individual chameleon models, exclude between 4 and 12 orders of magnitude in chameleon couplings to matter.