Constraints on New Gravitylike Forces in the Nanometer Range

TL;DR

This study sets new experimental constraints on hypothetical gravitylike forces at nanometer scales by analyzing neutron scattering off xenon gas, significantly improving existing limits within the 0.04 to 4 nm range.

Contribution

The paper provides the first precise measurements constraining gravitylike forces at nanometer distances using neutron scattering, surpassing previous limits by up to a factor of 10.

Findings

New limits on gravitylike forces at 0.1 and 1.0 nm ranges.

Improved constraints by up to a factor of 10 over previous results.

Collected around 10^7 scattering events for analysis.

Abstract

We report on a new constraint on gravitylike short-range forces, in which the interaction charge is mass, obtained by measuring the angular distribution of 5 A neutrons scattering off atomic xenon gas. Around 10^7 scattering events were collected at the 40 m small angle neutron scattering beam line located at the HANARO research reactor of the Korean Atomic Energy Research Institute. The extracted coupling strengths of new forces in the Yukawa-type parametrization are g^2 = (0.2 \pm 6.8 \pm 2.0) \times 10^-15 GeV^2 and g^2 = (-5.3 \pm 9.0 + 2.7 -2.8) \times 10^-17 GeV^2 for interaction ranges of 0.1 and 1.0 nm, respectively. These strengths correspond to 95% confidence level limits of g^2 < (1.4 \pm 0.2) \times 10^-14 GeV^-2 and g^2 < (1.3 \pm 0.2) \times 10^-16 GeV^-2, improving the current limits for interaction ranges between 4 and 0.04 nm by a factor of up to 10.